“because i came to you, in the winter. i came to you when he was gone, and i had no idea what to do. i said, ‘geoffrey’s dead, i found him in the snow by the meadow.’ you remember what you said to me?”
“i said you should have been there with him.”
or: the stupendous stoats have been breaking my little heart something fierce, thank you @quiddie and @dimension20official for this gift
Anyone who is interested in Eldritch Horror as a genre needs to watch Burrow’s End. Aabria is giving us a master class in what makes Eldritch Horror so scary. It’s not just that there’s a big scary monster that has the wrong number of limbs or eyes (although we are getting that in the form of the hazmat suits), nor is it the wrongness of the effects of the creatures (which we get in the parasitic chipmunks), it’s how much bigger everything is than the stoats.
It’s the concept of witnessing something so much above and beyond your comprehension that you can’t describe it. It’s trying to explain what that thing is when you don’t have the vocabulary, and how strange things become when you have to dumb down what you saw so others can understand. Having to say things like “non-bear” and “blue sun”. It’s trying to explain what reading is when there’s no concept of a written language with letters. How unsettling things are when you can’t understand.
We even get the root of Eldritch Madness in Thorn. He seems strange, sketchy, and even unstable to his family, not because he’s actually “mad” but because he witnessed something incomprehensible. He understands something fundamental about the world that no one else can grasp unless they’ve also witnessed it.
Everything about this, even the pieces of the puzzle that the audience can put together with their own experiences, is made unsettling and strange.
lukas is the most quintessential example of an npc the dm made up on the fly and gave a funny voice but now the party's obsessed with him and he HAS to come everywhere
OH HI let's talk about that episode 8 reveal for a second cause I don't know how much of an overlap there is between country music listeners and Dimension 20 viewers but this hit me like a ton of bricks and therefore I can't shut up about it.
So Tula's character card has a song lyric on it, "a single mom that works two jobs."
This is a lyric from Reba McEntire's "Survivor," which gets stuck in my head every time I see it, and it always seemed sensible, the next line is "who loves her kids and never stops," a perfectly Tula sentiment.
But, notably, the first verse of "Survivor" establishes that said single mom MEDICALLY SHOULD NOT BE ALIVE.
Are you seriously telling me. That Burrow's End has been hinting at this fucking twist. From episode one. By means of REBA GODDAMN MCENTIRE?!?
Brighter than the sun.... Swifter than the wind.... Holy fucking moly guys...
[ ID: A drawing of Thorn Vale, a stoat, standing on all fours with a wide stance and yelling. He's yelling "I was a prophet the whole time!!" with a shocked expression. He has various lighting shaped marks on his fur. End ID ]
Siobhan and Izzy also absolutely nail the way kids sometimes just say the absolute sweetest and loving things super nonchalantly and then go talk about something else
Like "I'll be brave for you, no actually I learned to be brave from you"
And then immediately gets into a fight with his sister about who's braver goddamn
honestly being a forever dm is so mom friend coded of course Brennan is playing a pc that’s a mom (AN AMAZING MOM) and killing us with it. It’s in his bones. Man’s makes stories to tell with his friends as his fucking job. That’s so mom. He starts everything off with a “hey gang”, like my mom does when she needs to talk to my family as a whole
i do find it incredibly interesting looking at previous events from a perspective of “ it always pays to follow the neurodivergent child “ while lila is very arguably also neurodivergent
jasohn is energetic and more accident prone so he gets most of the adults’ attention . from the adults perspective he’s not as smart as lila , so they need to take care of him
they praise his skills because they know they also look at him as a bit slower than his sister . his skills are less obvious . as brennan puts it , he’s a screw up . so the things he does do well they praise him for , and that’s great , but because lila so consistently grasps concepts and helps without needing to be asked , she doesn’t get as much recognition for it
i wonder if part of the reason she doesn’t trust thorn is because he’s truly acknowledging her skills from the perspective of an outsider , someone who hasn’t gotten used to her always being there and forgotten to keep saying she’s doing a good job
i wonder if lila is so good at listening because she’s used to being in the background