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i know a lot of people hc jester as being secretly very sad and using her upbeat attitude to hide her pain but i honestly don't think thats true. her biggest problem a lot of the time really IS "i miss my mom :(" or "i reallly want that coat but i cant afford it rn" because she's a happy person with an overall happy upbringing. and to me this makes her empathy with the less life-enthused members of the party (see: beau and caleb) a lot more admirable, since she's choosing to empathize. she's actively putting in effort. she has no inherent understanding of the kind of mental state that would make you scared and angry all the time, so she makes herself understand. she asks caleb questions and waits patiently until he's ready to answer, she matches nott's enthusiasm and doesn't pry into her secrets, she hangs out with beau even though she's kind of a bummer (especially mid campaign), she isn't scared of yasha, talks to cad on his level, and defends fjord without question even when she's salty over avantika. jester is not a sad person bonding with sad people about being sad; she's a very happy person bonding with sad people about detectives and flowers and that bug we saw the other day. it's like how she uses the sending spell: sure, i could stop at seventeen, but why waste the other eight? sure, i could just love the people that let me right away, but why waste all the rest? she knows her own magic. she knows you don't have to use all twenty five. she also knows her own heart, and uses it to love on purpose anyway. jester lavorre, you will forever be famous.

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Critical Role: 10 Years of Storytelling

Campaign 1, Episode 115, "The Chapter Closes." // Taliesin Jaffe, in "As D&D booms, 'Critical Role' makes its own kind of nerd celebrity" by Sarah Parvini // Campaign 3, Episode 31, "Breaking Point" // On Loving by Forugh Farrokhzad, tr. Sholeh Wolpé // The Legend of Vox Machina at NYCC 2022 // 8-bit Stories // Campaign 1 Wrap-Up // “Without You Without Them” by boygenius // Campaign 2, Episode 141, "Fond Farewells." // Campaign 3: Behind the Set // Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka // Campaign 1, Episode 115, "The Chapter Closes." // Explanation of the final Vex’ahlia playlist by Laura Bailey // Liam's Quest: Full Circle // Backwards by Warsan Shire // Exandria Unlimited: Kymal, Part 2 // Explanation of Fearne’s second playlist by Ashley Johnson // Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson // San Diego Comic-Con 2023, Critical Role: Fireside Chat & Cast Q&A // Exandria Unlimited Cooldown: Divergence Episode 4 // Campaign 3, Episode 23, "To the Skies." // Explanation of the final Percy playlist by Taliesin Jaffe // "For Good" by Stephen Schwartz // Campaign 3, Episode 91, "True Heroism." // Exandria Unlimited: Calamity, Episode 4, "Fire and Ruin." // Campaign 3, Episode 121, "A New Age Begins."

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EXU Divergence e2

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Can't wait for Exandria Unlimited: Divergence? Check out its intro, as posted to the Critical Role socials!

Visual Effects by Christian Brown, 3D modeling by Axolote Gaming, and musical theme by Colm R. McGuinness.

Divergence is a four-part miniseries and premieres tonight, February 13, in all the usual places.

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The Smartypants Society invites you to a new season of bold ideas, shocking revelations, and brilliantly stupid presentations!

Season 2 of Smartypants launches March 6th on Dropout.tv - join host Rekha Shankar and the members of our secret society for all the information you'll ever need to know about the future and history of everything...

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for those who didnt watch live i want yall to know that this was completely unprompted

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BANGING EVERY GOD IS GOING TO BECOME THE UNDERGROUND KINK SCENE CHALLENGE OF EXANDRIA, HUH

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via Matt's IG

Screencap credit (x)

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more donation gags (and one salute, sleep well whoever you are)

[Image IDs: A series of donation names: "my dead dad that siri just called", "I've had a olden p*nis statues glues to my hand for years", "Where In The World Is Yussa Errenis", and "I gotta go to bed soon y'all" ]

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The recent wildfires surrounding Los Angeles have absolutely devastated our local community. People across our city are without homes, without work, and without the things and places that they have held dear and it’s clear that it’s going to take a while to rebuild.

Starting today, January 27th and ending on February 28th, the Critical Role Foundation will allocate and evenly split every single dollar of each donation raised to the following organizations (not including admin fees):

California Community Foundation / Wildfire Recovery Fund

Latino Community Foundation

LA Fire Department Foundation

And, that’s not all! To help us raise the most funds possible for this critical (heh) cause, our amazing content team has been working tirelessly to create a special LIVE one-shot to benefit these three amazing organizations. Featuring our beloved Campaign 3 characters, Bells Hells (and GM’ed by Matthew!), we’ll be streaming LIVE live on Thursday, January 30th at 7pm Pacific on Beacon, Twitch, and YouTube with VOD available immediately after.  Here’s what our illustrious Game Master, Matthew Mercer, has planned for you:

Two Elemental Royals have made a wager: Are modern mortal “heroes” as resilient and courageous as those of legend? Hearing of the recent, wild exploits of Bells Hells, these two entities pluck the troupe from Exandria and force a series of challenges to test their skills, wit, and ability… all while the Elementals subtly manipulate the odds between Order and Chaos to serve their bet. Weird magics weave throughout the realm, as onlookers from across the realms alter the dangers mid-contest, rending the battlefield or even swapping souls between the players! Can Bells Hells survive this series of clashes, and does either Order or Chaos truly carve the path of a hero?

More information on CR's official page.

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endlessly thinking thoughts about cr characters, morality, and selfishness (likely place for me to be, given that my day job includes endlessly researching ethics and meaning of life) but in light of bell’s hells most recent illustration of their insularity and individualism, I’ve been really like. Trying to unpack why I find it particularly egregious in this party when obviously mighty nein were notoriously self-interested, especially at the beginning, and when vox machina had quite a few moments where their horses were far higher than they had any reason to be. And again, I really want to make it clear her that I don’t hold self-interest or selfishness to be some abhorrent and unforgivable thing, in fact I think its incredibly normal especially given the context of main characters in a story told through game mechanics that flourish on the interest of the individuals making the choices. I’ve written before about how one of the throughlines that I’ve seen in laura’s pcs (since I’m someone who particularly enjoys looking at the moral outlooks characters develop) is a common thread of morality that’s highly dependent on their own interests. And like, this is a positive throughline to me! Without getting into my own views on morality, it is particularly compelling to me for characters with isolated upbringing (which applies to vex, jester, and imogen, each in different ways) to develop a moral code informed by that isolation, and in vex we see her moral code is ‘anything goes if it protects those I hold dear’, in jester we see a moral code that doesn’t care about morality as much as it cares about the chance to care and be cared for, and in imogen we see a moral code developed in response to her very unique experience of hearing the darkest parts of people and judging them on those (which to be clear, i am not judging her for that fact, I think it makes extreme sense for someone who hears the thoughts the people have to be horrified by those things, but it does mean her moral system is almost completely backwards, where intention holds more weight than action, which perhaps makes sense of the popularity of defending all of her ideas and choices and the Right Ones by certain parts of the fandom that insist leftism is hidden in the dnd real play). And that’s all to say that, out of the cr parties we’ve seen, I don’t think any single member of bell’s hells is uniquely more or less selfish or more or less of an asshole than previous characters. And in fact, I tend to be quite fond of selfish characters, I have a well documented history of cherishing them well beyond the cr fandom. But the point is that my calling something or someone self-interested is not a value judgement in this context, it's a descriptive claim about the traits a character exhibited.

Imogen, who has insisted time and time again re: the values of the accord that she would not be swayed by the temptation of predathos because she recognizes the importance of this fight, only to turn around and pretty immediately open herself up to predathos to fulfil the most threatening part of ludinus’ plan is self-interested. I cannot conceive of any other way to describe her choices. And her being self-interested doesn’t mean she can’t also be altruistic at times, but I will be clear that I don’t think her risking killing herself as she attempts to bring down the god-eater that she released is particularly selfless. In my best faith interpretation I’d say she’s pretty middle of the road in that choice. But I bring all this up because a comparison I’ve been seeing is that bell’s hells aren’t as mean as the mighty nein or even vox machina in certain moments and that it doesn’t make sense for the fandom to view bell’s hells as likely to be villains when the same wasn’t true of the previous two campaigns, and I think I have to pretty emphatically disagree, and not because I don’t think there aren’t moments in both campaigns that feature extremely high levels of assholery and villainry from pcs – I mean, some of my favourite cr characters are percy and jester, both of whom i’d say are ‘good guys’ due to the pure luck of the found familys they fell in with and both of whom often suggested plans that were. Not okay. To say the least. But ignoring the difference between suggesting fucked up plans and walking your god-eater infused bestie back towards the troops sent to support you in keeping that entity contained, the other big difference I’ve noticed in my own introspection on how I react to bh vs mn and vm, as well as which things i cherish about previous campaigns that were really missing from c3 to what I think is the story and the character’s detriment (staying away from the shape of the narrative, just because others have made posts that put words together better about that than I can) is that while members of vm and mn remained self-interest to the end of their campaigns and have reasserted those habits in appearances since, the parties as entities working in exandria had both, to echo ashton’s apt suggestion to ludinus, grown up.

Like one moment I think of is beau and fjord’s convo in the nein hells episode, because beau is being her asshole self and fjord is being his ‘I care about My People and I’ll think about the rest later’ self (i say affectionately but certain parts of the fandom I recognize would view derogatorily) – clearly they’re not the kindest people as they discuss bell’s hells, but two notable things are (a) they still treat the hells with the respect and use their means to help them prepare for the battle coming, even when they hear the horrifying thought that the hells aren’t certain they’ll choose to save the gods, all the nein request is that they choose the kind option (b) they say none of their doubts to the hells themselves – likely because they have the empathy to realizes that its a high stress situation that won’t be made better by a reminding the hells how small and likely ineffectual in the universe they are – and their comments about cannon fodder are ones made in jest to each other. Even taking that in the worst faith interpretation, the jokes that beau and fjord make in a private conversation has absolutely zero influence on bh. This is quite different than bells hells, after like. as clearly betraying the accord they promised to assist (even if their intentions are ‘good’) as is possible, belittling the religious armies sent to support their endeavor to keep predathos sealed as they all feel the weight of an irrevocable change occurring in exandria, one bells hells has first account knowledge now that it IS incredibly willing to eat mortals, and laudna and ashton, the members of bells hells most often cited by certain fandom spaces as characters who have gone through so much and it only made them kind and strong, look into the faces of people facing literally existential threat and laugh and mock them. That is, mighty nein as individuals is comprised of some of the, perhaps, most asshole pcs, but The Mighty Nein as a party is committed to treating others the best they can, to leaving things better than they found them (a quote that I think is particularly exemplary of the dynamics of self-interest at play in the mighty nein, since it originated as a blatant illustration of molly’s notion of self-importance but developed to become a kind of commandment that the nein became committed to fulfilling). The opposite is true of bell’s hells, where orym and dorian at least both seem to have motivation beyond themselves, imogen’s changes but has shown she is capable of letting go of her ‘intention reigns’ requisitely individualistic perspective, and chetney plays up his selfishness but has shown himself to care quite a bit for people beyond their party but bell’s hells as an entity is uh, pretty self-interested.

To clarify some of my thoughts here in the spirit of the wicked renaissance happening rn, I’ve always felt that for good was an incredibly apt song for the mighty nein, because it really nails that feeling that perhaps they didn’t change each other as individuals to become better people on the grand scale, maybe they’ve just changed each other permanently, but they (and I would agree with this) view each other as having changed each other for the better (e.g., I don’t know if I could say whether jester is a morally better Individual at the end of the campaign, but I can say with certainty that she fulfils and makes moral choices in her work as a member of the mighty nein). And I don’t know if this can be said about bell’s hells – I think they have certainly influenced each other and changed how alone many of those characters felt, and that is not a slight on the story, it can be a great centre for a story to focus on how a relinquishment of the feeling that one is alone in the world can change them. But for the most part, that hasn’t been bh’s story, their story instead has been about validating their refusal to become anything beyond what they insist was out of their control. And not to get to annoying philosophy student about it but bell’s hells are maybe some of the most explicit examples of sartrian bad faith I’ve seen in fiction in a hot minute, because their insistence that they treat their wounds as incurable and entirely out of their hands has led to them limiting their own potential because many of them ignore their responsibility as people to make choices in their own lives. In contrast, at the end of the campaign, mighty nein are still assholes as we all like to refer to them as, but in the context of an apocalypse, I think I’d prefer the assholes like fjord – who is certainly being truthful when he says he doesn’t care about what harm comes to 200 people when jester is at risk but who also, as they traverse into aeor, is insistent that their group won’t be running away from whatever apocalyptic threat awaits them, even if that means dying in the fight – than I would an asshole like ashton – who promises to fight for the little guys but who then turns around and acts upon a philosophy that says the strongest will survive. When you look at the mighty nein, it is incredibly easy to see the fingerprints of change they’ve left upon one another, and even to see the boundaries they place on one another’s asocial behaviours through their presence in one another’s lives (more recently the group chastising jester’s fond words about ludinus is a good example, but others are yasha’s pressuring caleb and essek to move on from their wizard talks as they collect paper in aeor instead of venturing further toward the battle they have to fight, or fjord and jester’s frustrated conversation in the ukotoa reunion about how fjord made a stupid decision and he doesn’t regret but he feels dejected and jester checking him on the fact that they still need to figure out a solution). It takes some extrapolation to see how bells hells have changed each other in more than aesthetic ways, if they have at all. Because the catalyst for change is pressure to do so, and aside from moments where it was truly change or be left behind, bh doesn’t challenge each other unless forced to by morri’s trials or delilah’s interruption and on the very odd occasion an interesting game of rollies-spin-the-bottle. 

And it’s interesting because the asshole behaviour of the mighty nein, like bell’s hells, stems from being left on the outskirts of society and the mistreatment that comes with that, so seemingly the change from being alone to being with others is one that actually insists upon being challenged to grow and change. I mean, just looking at the starting points of the characters, there’s an intriguing amount of stark similarities between their pasts; jester and fearne were both people loved dearly by the family they grew up with but who were loved within the confines of a gilded cage, ashton and beau both have an glaring self awareness that their anger at the world has a very particular source (their parents) but use that as justification rather than a means of self reflection, yasha and orym are trying to navigate a world in the wake of an incomprehensible loss and a sense of duty, fjord and imogen are both seeking out knowledge of their own powers and unknowingly retreading the paths of their missing and presumed dead parental figures. The idea that bell’s hells are uniquely mistreated by society in the history of cr player characters is, politely, laughable. Absolutely they’re mistreated, and I think it could be fair to say these characters are more defined by their isolation than others but I think that has more to do with the lack of downtime rp than it has to do with the context of their suffering.

What I have loved about the mighty nein is that in their realization that the bonds they forge with each other are undermining the truths most of them had taken to be true – that they were alone and without a place in the world – they are also forced to realize that no longer being alone and isolated comes with the weight of social responsibility. And this was born out of a willingness the mighty nein had to call each other out and that the players had to allow their characters to be wrong and get called on it. Because that’s the friction of living with other people on the small party scale and the large world scale – in the mighty nein’s ability to survive as a people who cared for each other even when they didn’t agree or when they made decisions that they couldn’t understand, they were constantly developing their ability to care for the very same world that left them alone. Because in campaign two, the world as a whole had the role that the gods have in campaign 3 – why should a party of nobodies, treated like shit by the world and the people in it go through the effort of saving it?

And the mighty nein answered, in their own imperfection and assholery, that nothing is ever just one thing – one of the things I cherish most about campaign 2 is its commitment to ambiguity, allowing the complexity of the world to go unsolved because there is no solution to the fact that life is immense and sometimes incoherent. I don’t think its a coincidence that I’ve seen some of the people lamenting the idiocy of fandom members like me who think that it actually isnt a leftist win to destroy the world in the hopes of spontaneous justice arising in c3 are the same people who criticised c2’s conclusion with the cerberus assembly for not being leftist (a word which for them means . the aesthetic image of a rebellion sparked and not the unending commitment to doing what you practically can to make life more just for those around you – whether they’re particularly kind to you or not) enough. The conclusion of c2 emphasizes that the choice to make the world a better place isn’t something that can be achieved in one single sweeping action that will wipe the boards clean – there is no murder of all the members of the cerberus assembly that would’ve solved the problems that caused the assembly’s power. There is no forcing of the god’s out of exandria that will deal with the actual issue undergirding both bh and their blorbo-moralized fans' criticism of the gods, which is that mortals are cursed with the burden of free will, and being mistreated by other mortals means constantly having to try and make sense of the fact that someone chose to do something cruel to you (and, sometimes, that you made a choice that allowed that cruelty to occur) – a burden made much heavier when the person who hurt you is your cult-indoctrinated mother, or your cult leader father, or the person in the mirror. The mighty nein take up this fight, and the complexities of their individual identities begin to heal in the light of a commitment in their relationship as friends and as a team to improve the world, even on the small scale. Bell’s hells remain gridlocked and stagnant and unwilling to change in an unspoken turf war of self-interest because they’ve insisted (influenced in part by the context of the campaign 3 narrative but, as others have aptly pointed out, that narrative was much more influenced by bh’s lack of curiosity regarding anything except their own minds) upon finding a solution to a problem they’ve decided is earth-shatteringly (quite literally, to the people of ruidus) unjust based on, aside from encounters where fellow mortals were the primary oppressors, their own testimony of the god’s not listening to them and the obvious villain’s parallel testimony. Something I’ve really been chewing on lately is caduceus words to fjord about his role as a paladin of the wildmother – that maybe it just means that someday, someone will pray for a miracle, and there fjord’ll be and the weight that has given that fjord’s bond to ukotoa came from his desperation not to die and his willingness to accept whatever help would be offered, that fjord could now be the person that reaches out to someone in need, and that the hand he offers won’t come with a curse.  And I think that’s really the poignant difference between bh and mn for me, that for bh, their experiences of injustice, though did make them personally bitter, did not make them morally misanthropic.

Comparatively, Bell’s Hells chose to ensure that, because the gods never answered their prayers, they shouldn’t be permitted to answer anyone else’s. Is this an understandable position? Sure, for the walls of a preschool, not really for a group of characters that I will ever be in any way inclined to view as something close to heroes. While it’s true that there are parts of life that are beyond our control – somethings happen to us that we have no say in, and they cause injuries both physical and mental that we are left to heal without any rhyme or reason, it is still our responsibility to heal them. And if you choose not to, well, then you’ve chosen not to, and are responsible for the consequences and judgements that choice might amount to.

Anyway, sorry this is all over the place but TLDR: calling bell’s hells as a party self-interested is actually just descriptively correct – they can save members of the party made up of their close friends and still be self-interested – and while the individual members of bell’s hells actually aren’t all that uniquely self-interested in the history of cr pcs, the party is uniquely self-interested in how they’ve chosen to navigate the world an their responsibility to the people in it.

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based off of what im seeing on my dash i think imogen got the hdywtdt on predathos. so im choosing to believe that imogen got to eat predathos. doesnt matter whether its true or not. i want it to be true. pulled a big ole uno reverse. it ate (absorbed?) her. wanted to eat the gods. and then through a series of Events™. imogen unate/unfused herself. and turned it back on it. and with everyone's help. took a big ole bite. how does that work when last i checked she and predathos were the same creature. dont even worry about it. she ate him i think. good job imogen.

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predathos fight Faces of Stress

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Could this be solved by giving Imogen a snickers

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cheers to whoever wrote literally the most perfect angela prompt imaginable

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it feels fitting that ludinus da'leth has to burn a legendary resistance to keep concentration while a dead rat humps the back of his neck