Critical Role! D&D With Nerdy-Ass Voice Actors

Spoiler: 89

So that was an amazing episode.
First the resurrection? The callbacks from Keyleth and Grog :') and Vex just OFFERING TO TAKE DOWN ORCUS, seriously, the next arc is going to be BANANAS. So much emotion and an entire myth arc turning on Vex, just as it did last time with the twins except in reverse. Also I'm having quadrant feelings of all things: "I can't live without you"/"You know I'm in love with you, right?"/"No one gets to kill you but me" = Vax's moirail, matesprit, and kismesis just brought him back from the dead.
Keyleth's first Shapechange :O
Then PIIIIIKE and Pike fucking with Taryon so gloriously -- I love when the logic of emergent nonsense in this game leaves Matt speechless with laughter so he can barely describe what the ridiculous outcome of the players' actions is.
And finally the tome. The horrifically fucked-up backstory of Thordak and Opash at last revealed, with the tension of Vex reading it and everyone piling buff spells on her before she even opened the book. So many HOLY SHIT moments in this episode.

I feel like Percy's been hitting some sour notes lately, though. That speech to Keyleth felt forced. The genre-savvy seen-everything horror-dark-fantasy protagonist act doesn't really work for Keyleth's arc (as dark as it can get sometimes!) So it just makes Percy come across as an insensitive pessimist who's trying to inject his own issues into someone else's life and culture. (Though I appreciated his apology to Grog for the friends last episode. He's trying to do better... even if he tries to buy Grog off with a damn pinwheel later.)
To be honest, I've felt like Taliesin's been floundering ever since Ripley died. He brought back Percy but he doesn't really know where to take him from here, with his arc resolved. So we get this veering between mid-Briarwood-arc cynicism/assholery, angst that can't quite pick a focal point, and cute Perc'ahlia shenanigans.
(I hope he's floundering, because if this is a coherent character decision it's a very, very dark one -- Percy's killed all the physical manifestations of his demons but doesn't know how to deal with the fact that he's still a fucked-up mess, so he's retreating behind old coping mechanisms and pushing away the only people who could even begin to help him.)

 

OK no I guess I'm genuinely upset about Percy

That brittle intellectual arrogance, "I'm the only one clever enough to see how awful the world really is," is too familiar to me. As is not wanting to be who you are but not knowing how to be anything else.

pls stop being an asshole to your friends and start making an effort to heal or you're going to end up like Ripley

 

I find the fact that Percy's last name is "de Rolo" so fucking funny because...


This, my friends, is a bolo de rolo, or "roll cake". It's made from ridiculously thin sponge cake rolled up with sweet guava cream and then covered in sparkling sugar.

So whenever there is mention of srs business stuff like "Whitestone belongs to the de Rolos" I just imagine Whitestone being ruled by delicious Brazilian confectionaries.

Edit: ...damn, now I want roll cake, but it's impossible to get good roll cake in the south >.<

 

rolos are also a candy
i heard something about rolos getting stuck in a vending machine and got some WEIRD mental images.

 

p sure that happens about halfway through the Briarwood arc

 

a single tear runs down my face and my heart grows 3 sizes whenever Grog and Pike interact

and if Grog says "my buddy Pike" my body is cleansed, my skin moisturized, and my hair gets poofier and shinier

 

SAME. For me, that also goes for when Grog calls her monster. Or, y'know. "MONSTAH!!!"

 

Spoiler: 93

I've been seeing a lot of people in the fandom talking about how they were one failed death save from a TPK.

Not a lot of people talking about how the Third Pact permits resurrection.

I don't think Critical Role would have ended if Keyleth died. I think Percy would have damned himself to save his friends.

 

I'm so glad to have found this, I love Critical Role.
I started catching up sometime around... September of last year, I think, and I'm currently at episode 82 so I'm not fully caught up yet but I'm getting there.

Sadly the twitter/tumblr/fandom freak out spoiled me about a couple of major things that are going to happen but I'm trying so good not to click all the spoiler warnings.
And hey, maybe I'll get caught up before episode 100.

(Also, I have the hugest crush on Vax. And Percy. And Taliesin even if I can spell Percival Frederickstein von Mussel de Rolo III without problems but Taliesin slays me. And I guess it's pretty easy to tell who my favorite NPC is ^^")

 

Spoiler: Spoilers ep 85

Oh holy hell I just watched 85 and Grog vs Groon 2 was amazing. I really liked that Grog got a chance to shine and be something... y'know, different than illiterate giant puppy. I'd love to see more of that. Is there going to be more of that?

And watching Scanlan leave the way he did... I have so many conflicting feelings now. I was spoiled before and knew Sam would get a new character going but I didn't really expect Scanlan leaving to go down the way it did. And Keyleth going "We're family... and family leaves." totally broke my heart.
I don't think any show ever had me crying as much as CR does.

Continued non-spoiler-y thoughts: I love everything (well, almost everything but I feel there's been enough discourse among Critters in the last week) about this show. It's certainly very cathartic at points.

Btw, I hope it's okay that I joined the discord. I won't really be joining in until I've caught up fully but I don't wanna chicken out once I'm caught up ^^"

 

If I could fanart, I'd do a series of "Nemesis" portraits with each of the PCs in profile facing someone

Keyleth & Raishan
Percy & Ripley
Grog & Kevdak
Vax and Vex both against Thordak, maybe? I'd say Vex and Saundor / Vax and Thordak but Vex deserves as much of that enmity and that kill as he does
Scanlan and... Kaylie??? It's a very different relationship than the others but as "antagonistic figure who defines much of their arc" it fits
and Pike hasn't had enough screentime for one of those, yet

 

Oooh I love that idea, maybe someone with artistic talent pics it up!

I do hope Pike gets enough screen time for an... arc, really, before the campaign is over. Fingers crossed!


Also, personal Critical Role note: As of this morning (CET+1) I am officially caught up and will be viewing live on Thursday (well, Friday morning for me. Like, 3 am morning ._.). Took me almost a year!

 

A good time for it! Party's back together, following up a plot hook that's been dangling since the Briarwood arc, and they're just about to do their 100th episode.

 

Spoiler: 49, 66

"Know that all life is connected in an impossibly small level, beyond the mind’s ability to understand on your level. Ideas transcend distance, language. Many share dreams, thoughts, inspirations without knowing. The fact that you are now aware of these-- others too may now be drawn to the search as well. Beware. Now go."

Originally I thought this line in "A Name is Earned" was Matt's bullshit justification for villains suddenly pursuing the Vestiges at the same time as VM after they rested unknown for thousands of years. Much later, I realized that the sphinx was definitely aware of Ripley scrying on the gun Percy took from her, and gave VM a veiled warning. You'd think I'd learn to stop underestimating the man.

 

Spoiler: fandom bullshit -- screaming at people not in this thread

holy shit, I am so tired of the black-and-white thinking about pretty much every character on this show

even acknowledging that I've done it myself to some extent in the past

It is POSSIBLE for someone to play a character that is neither "poor precious cinnamon roll who did nothing wrong (or if they ever did anything wrong it's OK bc Trauma)" nor "awful irredeemable person and the player is probably a bad person too for ruining the story I made up in my own head the Correct game Matt would be running if not for this jackass that the whole group's inexplicably continued playing with for half a decade."

A flawed person can be an interesting and compelling character. Grog's compassion and sense of fair play are at best unreliable checks on his bloodlust. Percy is an arrogant, reckless hypocrite who's in deep denial about most of his emotional problems. Scanlan rewrites the world to suit his whims, up to and including the insides of other people's heads (and that's leaving aside the chronic sexual harassment). I wouldn't trust any of these people to save my seat at the movie theater, much less befriend them. It's OK to recognize these things and still enjoy watching their exploits and shenanigans. Because it's a story.

It's also OK not to like certain characters, or to say you'd prefer the show if someone had made a different decision. But attributing malice to the players... First, do you really think they'd still be playing together if that was true? Second, if it was true, how the fuck would you know? You see them for 3-5 hours out of every 168, during the majority of which which they're playing a part. They're still people with feelings for the other six days. Of course they're not perfect. Nobody is.

The obvious solution for my own emotional stability is to stay off Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter. But then I'd miss all the cool meta and fanart... Sigh.

 

Actually they're all complex, flawed characters except my fave who has done nothing wrong. (my fave is whoever's speaking at the moment, good luck figuring out how this works)

So who are people terrible discoursing about this week?

Also since Taliesin came out as bi on Wednesday Club, I'm laughing at all the shitty LGBT+ discourse posts that called them all straight.

 

Yeah, some parts of the CR fandom have some big problems differentiating between IC and OOC from what I've seen. Like, of course no one's perfect, not IC or OOC but honestly like... perfect characters would be so boring? There'd be no room for... misunderstandings, having to figure out interpersonal problems and no room for growth.
I like to take Grog as an example, he's never been evil or anything of course, but it's amazing to see how much he grew from the very beginning and I wouldn't want to have missed that.

Spoiler: Talk of current Scanlan discourse

@Mala, I think people are still giving Scanlan a lot of shit. Some of it deserved, some of it bordering on "OMG Sam is absolutely awful bc Scalan is ~awful~. And like Frood said, that's just... questionable at best. Like, critters as a community saw how Orion lost his place on CR so they should see that they're very much open to throwing questionable people out.
But personally I think people just like to throw shit at Sam because of how Scanlan was in the beginning and haven't realized that Scanlan was always meant to be a deeply flawed character. From how he played Tary we know that Scanlan isn't the way he is because Sam is awful but because Scanlan just... isn't necessarily a good person.
I think a lot of that just plain comes from people not being familiar with how RPGs work and assuming players have to have a lot in common with their characters for whatever reason ._.

 

I think players do frequently have a lot in common with their characters, but also, RPGs (like theater!) can be outlets for things you'd express very differently IRL.

The rant above was occasioned by a lot of things, but the final straw was someone claiming that not only was Marisha playing Keyleth inconsistently by offering to

Spoiler: 104 spoilers

become Pelor's champion -- as if she wasn't playing it as very reluctant self-sacrifice in the face of everyone's silence!

but that she was deliberately upstaging Laura.

 

So uh, part of the reason I have a twitter now is because I heard that's where most of the CR fandom is?
And I have just started (god help me) and wanted to see cool things.

But now I'm hesitant.

But still like, any advice on who to follow and stuff?

 

AAAAAAAAAA?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!