#I'm obsessed with the idea of their dynamics changing so wildly between each other

[skunkoon]

It's about the dynamics👌 The switching👌 You see my vision.

[utilitycaster]

My head has been spinning recently just thinking about the sort of backlash that Laura and Marisha would get from fans if Imogen and Laudna didn't end up together.

For example, I can imagine them roleplaying a conversation in which one of pair reveals they have a crush on someone else in the party, and the other supports them fully in that endeavour. I can only imagine the people who would say "she looked away when she said that line so she's lying!!!" or "they're just denying their feelings for each other"

C3 is the first campaign I've managed to catch live, so I'm not sure if this sort of shipping happened in C2 or C1. I feel like Beau/Yasha would be most likely to have caused similar reactions, but even then, I don't think I've seen this amount of protectiveness over a ship that is this vague. Marisha and Ashley at least made it clear from e1 that their characters had (at the very least, one-sided) romantic interest.

Hi anon,

I've gotten a few questions to this effect and have declined to answer some because it does feel a bit like borrowing trouble, even though I will fully admit some of my private DMs look not unlike this. So I'm going to try to answer this with as much sensitivity and thoroughness as I can despite a number of frustrations (not with you, to be clear) and let this serve as my answer going forward unless anything drastically changes. I am making it non-rebloggable, under a cut, and will be blocking any clownery.

Let's rip off the bandaid right away: for some reason, and I have my theories but they are unconfirmed at in some cases, rather ungenerous, Marisha and Laura's characters have been heavily shipped in all three campaigns despite a chemistry I would call middling at best. I think the most generous way to put it is that while Ashley was working on Blindspot, they were often the only two women at the table (though one must look a bit askance at how Veth is often ignored as a female character, despite unambiguously being one). So I suspect that a lot of it comes from simply wanting an F/F romance between main cast PCs during Campaign 1 and having no good options, and then...remaining fixated on that particular cast dynamic, despite, as stated before, chemistry that has never particularly impressed me.

I did not watch Campaign 1 live, so I don't know what the discourse was at the time. I did watch Campaign 2 live and your prediction is accurate. The ship that caused similar reactions was actually Beau and Jester; you can still find people who claim it was a "mistake" to pursue Beauyasha instead and that Beauyasha "came out of nowhere" and was "for the straights." You are also entirely correct that people will grasp at the weakest of straws to support a ship, though, in all fairness, this is not remotely limited to femslash shippers but is a general shipping problem. (The worst offender during Campaign 2 for that, in my opinion, were people who shipped Caleb and Jester and who became creepily obsessed with Laura's expressions late in the game; that is also incidentally still the ship that I think has the most parallels to Imogen and Laudna in terms of canon character relationship vs. fanon perceptions.)

I do expect that if Imogen and Laudna do not get together, for whatever reason, there will be considerable denial. We've already seen some misplaced vitriol towards Ashton, and the response among shippers towards Imogen has, as I've pointed out over the past two weeks, been wildly inconsistent and deeply ungenerous in a desperate attempt to twist her actions in favor not just of the ship, but towards a highly specific idea of the ship as soft girlfriends against the cruel world, instead of a complicated codependence with the potential for becoming something more. I and others have also pointed out that the ship has gone from "they are already in love" to "a QPR would also be totally cool" which is rather unkind to QPRs.

I should also acknowledge the elephant in the room. I am well aware that I am probably public enemy number one on the Imogen/Laudna server where they come up with such bon mots as "bone-dry takes". I suspect this is because I genuinely enjoy both Imogen and Laudna as individual characters and write about them a lot, but in doing so, acknowledge the cracks and tension within their relationship. So on some level, even though the ship could absolutely still happen, they've already kind of started with some of the behaviors you mention, which is rather disappointing.

Anyway, I think this is all to say that this is a general problem in shipping across the board that is not confined to Imogen and Laudna nor F/F ships, but because that specific ship is both, as you say, vague, and yet has an extremely popular and extremely narrow fanon interpretation, it's in particular focus this campaign. I think you're correct that there will be backlash should it not happen, though I would be pleasantly surprised and deeply humbled if there is not. Fortunately I have found that Critical Role is fairly impervious to fandom backlash in terms of the decisions they make in-game, because let's face it, people will push back on anything, including such necessary parts of story as "dramatic tension" and "conflict." If you listened to them you would make the world's shittiest story, and because there are frequently multiple conflicting ships, you can't please everyone. I'm here to watch a story, and I do think ships are intrinsically part of character arcs, so if the ships serve the characters, whatever they are, I think it will be a worthwhile endeavor.

[valkyrhys]

oh i would LOVE the director’s cut on restoration if you haven’t been asked already! i’m so intrigued by how the idea came to you and how you mapped it out and got it written 😍

ahh yes!! this got long so the answer is under the cut :)

I had wanted to write something set in the Catskill mountains since I was 15 and stayed in a cabin in the mountains for a weekend. I drafted countless beginnings throughout high school and college, fics and original fiction alike, trying to get a sense of what type of world and circumstances I wanted to create. I could never quite merge my ideas together in a way that worked.

there was a brief time— literally no more than a few days— where I thought about trying to write it as a bellarke AU in the summer of 2019, but that idea never took off, and the idea remained dormant.

then I watched season 1 of the witcher a few months later.

I became absolutely obsessed with the potential of a ciri/geralt dynamic. after a bit of deliberation, I came to the realization that 1) I didn't know enough about the universe to feel comfortable writing a canon ciralt fic 2) I didn't feel like getting flayed alive by antis (that feeling has since passed) and 3) why should I attempt to translate that dense world into a modern AU when I can just write my own story?

historically, I had 0 success writing original work before. I could never finish anything, could barely start anything without losing steam super quick. but for some reason I just couldn't shake this idea. who were these new characters? they weren't ciri and geralt, but they were reminiscent in their dynamic and their bond to each other.

how did that bond come to be? what experiences forced them together? why do they stay together? what are the complications in their lives? how much sex do they have and when does it start?

those were some of the things i was thinking while the idea was taking shape in my mind. and then I came to the big question: how do you create a societally-appropriate age gap romance? how do you create a relationship between two people with wildly different life experiences where they're both on an even playing field?

answer: you take away the society. you create a new playing field.

once I came to that realization, it was like something in my brain chemistry changed. I was so excited to tell this story, so much so that constantly revising and updating my outline was not draining but invigorating. I could see it becoming better and more real with each pass.

I also came to understand the value of a shitty first draft. of stream of consciousness writing, putting every thought down and going back to make sense of it later.

this was mostly theoretical until march 2020, when the restaurant I was working at closed without warning and all of a sudden I had no job and lots of free time to dedicate to this. it was a huge outlet for me, something positive to focus on during such an awful time. in fact, the original plotline that I had devised for the bellarke AU had them hiding out in the mountains after a plague, but that was hitting too close to home so I changed it to zombies for this draft.

I was never an outliner. I barely used to revise anything. I had some teachers and professors that used to require us to submit a first draft, and for that I would usually make a copy of the essay I had already written and just add mistakes. I thought I was being efficient, and I guess I was, but at the cost of quality.

now, my process from outline to finished draft requires at least 6 revisions. I thought that revising and outlining would slow me down, but it's made me faster. I think I've written more in the last 18 months or so than I had in the years before because now I know how a story works. it's amazing!

the response to Restoration is something I never ever expected, and it's brought me to tears on more than a few occasions. everyone's support has been so wonderful and I'm just so happy that I was able to create something I'm proud of and that people seem to love it a much as I do.

[lollytea]

Hi! So I started watching Jungle Cubs because of your stories and what is going on in the second season?? Aside from the different designs and voice actors, the changes in the team's dynamic is weird, especially because it's quite sudden. Like, I'm glad that we see Bagheera becoming more mature, the moral guide of the group and the person they seem to go to for advice, but what the hell is up with Khan? He's hardly shown as part of the group anymore! You got any thoughts on this?

OH MY GOD YEAH. I get so mad about season 2, they really did not have to do the boys so dirty like that. The reason things are so weirdly different is cuz they changed the production company in between seasons and seemed to basically rework the entire series from scratch. The whole tone of the show is different now and everything feels a lot more hollow. The characters themselves feel like the writers took ONE personality trait each from their season 1 selves and exaggerated it to the point of ridiculousness.

I love the idea of Bagheera becoming wiser as he gets older but I really don’t like the way he’s characterized in this season. The best example I can think of is when he comes across some of the cubs having a mud fight. Season 1!bagheera probably would have just rolled his eyes or laughed at them from a safe distance. This Bagheera gasps, scandalized and demands that they stop this instant because it’s “bad manners”??? Like dude who are you??? They just made him such a neurotic “no fun allowed” type guy. I also really dislike his new voice. No offense to Dee Bradley Baker, he’s a very talented voice actor, just not a fan of this voice in particular.

But oh my god, Khan. They destroyed the poor boy, it’s absolutely tragic. All of the appeal of Shere Khan from season 1 is that he sorta acted like a brat and he got on the others nerves but he could be a really good friend yknow? Like he loved his friends and they loved him. That’s why he hung out with them all the time and played with them and joked around with them. He was fucking ride-or-die too, throwing himself into fights with animals twice his calibre, just so he could protect them. Shere Khan was a good kid man!! Which is why it’s so sad that season 2 basically reworked him as a guy who just pops in every now and then to bully them and really doesn’t seem to give two shits about any of them.

And not even that but he’s also stupidly exaggerated. His season 2 spotlight episode “nice tiger” just seems wildly out of character for everyone involved. This version of Shere Khan is so adamant that nobody believe he’s “nice” something I really don’t think season 1!Khan would give a shit about. He’d probably just scoff and be like “nice. Yeah right.” But this one is obsessed with defining himself as this creature of evil or whatever. Like Khan’s edgelord tendencies from season 1 are amped up to eleven. And the other kids too. They spend the whole episode trying to find something nice about Shere Khan and eventually accept that there’s nothing, which is complete bullshit. The season 1 version of these kids understood their friend and knew he cared about them even if he acted like a bitch about it. But here they seem to barely know him at all. It’s frustrating how their relationship with Shere Khan was just trashed like this.

Anyway I really don’t like season 2. They ONLY things I take from it to use in my own stuff is Bagheera liking to paint and shere khan loving his grandma. Also that one time they subtly called Bagheera gay. Everything else I ignore and pretend it didn’t happen.