#also I really feel like choosing Orym made the most sense | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

weatherfey · 5 months

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I think a lot about the way Dorian used to see Cyrus as the perfect older brother, the perfect prince; the way Dorian felt free to go and find himself because Cyrus was capable and dependable and ready to be a leader. That isn’t the Cyrus we see! But I think it’s a lot more interesting, for both Cyrus and Dorian, to take that seriously. They’re princes, and we don’t know what that means because we haven’t seen their home, but socially a court is an elaborately constructed farce. And of course it can be easier to be competent in any familiar environment, but I also think it’s easier to know how you fit within a court environment specifically because there is an overwhelming number of factors to define yourself against and they all have expectations of you, and if they aren’t suffocating you like some kind of spider’s web then it might be perfect, like being a star in a constellation, or just the right puzzle piece. I think it’s reasonable to think that Cyrus was something like who Dorian thought he was, at home; except that Cyrus, like Dorian, wanted to choose the things he’s defining himself against. And I think it’s meaningful that he got swindled in the immediate aftermath of discarding that constellation of puzzle pieces. He was a fool (beloved), but it happened in the first blush of freedom, when he was just starting to figure out who he was or wanted to be without all that defined expectation, which is also - not coincidentally - the state Dorian was in when the spider queen sunk her fingers into his heart and twisted his alignment. The ‘hello world! uh oh’ of it all is something they had in common.

(Something they both had in common with Opal, too.)

I do think it’s interesting to look at Dorian’s sense of responsibility in light of this. I almost think Orym was a kind of north star for Dorian through parts of EXU prime, and I ship them, but it really felt like one of the things that made him able to reject the spider queen is that Orym needed him to. I think he wanted to be someone Orym could rely on, but I think Orym’s regard mattered to him because they genuinely had that protective urge in common - the pathway the spider queen used to skitter in was Dorian’s desire to protect his friends. And that drive to protect added a lot of poignancy to the in-universe reason that Dorian couldn’t return to bell’s hells after Cyrus’s debts were repaid, not just because Cyrus was still getting his legs under him but also because Opal needed help. That’s responsibility, again - he’s finishing what they started. Duty, obligation, but this time he’s chosen who and what he’s beholden to. Like maybe he’s chosen a new version of a puzzle piece that he might have thought he was throwing out entirely when he chose freedom and walked away from home.

I loved that Fearne’s vision also haunted Dorian; he misses her, and it also feels like a solid way to illustrate the spider queen’s effect on Dorian, that the danger of his own corruption has rarely been something he had the luxury to think about. His friends have always needed him. I don’t know if he had time to process his aborted fall during his time in Zephrah, or if there’s still something underneath, but I think it’s telling that this fear doesn’t look like Opal, the one literally bleeding ichor from her forehead; it predates that, it started before Opal was the one to worry about.

And I think he knows he didn’t fail them - Cyrus, Opal, Fy’ra - accidental thunder damage notwithstanding - but, with the way he felt through that suggestion spell and its aftermath, I don’t really know what to make of his abandoning Dariax. It’s a little hard to look at that and not see a drive to isolate. Determined to leave him with a good memory, but most of all, to leave. He started that one-shot interlude having just admitted to himself that he was longing to be Somewhere Else, but I almost wonder if he still would have gone back to bell’s hells if Orym hadn’t asked.

(God, the suggestion spell. The way they processed it was hurtful to me personally. Dariax immediately shifting from ‘won’t leave Opal!’ to ‘let’s go! Opal has a plan’ kind of broke my heart, and I actually think that the spell could have worked on Dorian by just making what was really happening feel reasonable - the last shred of your friend is trying to save you, and you can’t save her from anything except becoming your murderer, so you should do that. But the spell can’t make sense out of abandoning Cyrus’s body, so Dorian just goes numb with grief and rage. Mass suggestion is 24 hours. That is 24 hours of numbness, and rage, and walking, and walking, and walking, and every once in awhile Dariax’s voice, friendly and steady and sure, ‘Opal has a plan.’ And at the end of it the ability to feel returns, but he’s so tired, and he hurts, and everything hurts too much to think about, and poor Dariax probably stops in his tracks, just ‘Dorian? What was Opal’s plan?’)

And he really was so angry. It’s interesting to wonder if that’s still under the surface. He immediately turned to levity - for their sake, and his own - but that moment where the group tells him who killed Will and Derrig, and Robbie instantly wrote down Otohan’s name, didn’t just read like a player taking notes, to me, it read like Dorian putting a name in a ledger. I think it’s easy to let that go because he learns that she’s dead in the very next moment, but I think Dorian felt a weird kind of relief for that half-second, because so much of his anger at what happened to Cyrus and Opal was from being forced to acknowledge that there wasn’t anyone easy to blame, except perhaps a god; and blaming a god is like blaming the universe. What a relief, however short lived, to be faced with a problem you can solve.

#critical role #exandria unlimited #dorian storm #crown keepers #here’s me with my king lear court fool feels #the way nothing that depends on structure works anymore once you break out of it #unless and until you make your own #and my continuing fascination with dorian’s self-conscious but achingly sincere attempt at self invention #performance as a kind of honesty #i do wonder what this could mean for dorian when all this is over #i hope he only goes home if it’s something he wants #i want him to have what he wants #(orym)

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