#honestly it's a pretty elegant solution to a pants-shittingly terrifying problem

[theglintoftherail]

I know a lot of people are pretty ambivalent about the detour that The Adventure Zone is taking right now, but I think it is absolutely the right decision for the show at this point - possibly the only decision that could have balanced meeting the demands of the narrative with respecting the autonomy of the players and the emotional weight of the characters.

Obviously a shitton of spoilers below:

The thing is, Griffin has said that he developed this basic story concept by the end of the first arc. And back then, the main characters were just barely becoming actual characters - they were vehicles for Griffin's family to make goofs. So Griffin thought "ooh you know what would be cool? If these guys were secretly mind-wiped scientists from an alternate dimension," and I kind of doubt it even crossed his mind to consider the personal emotional implications of that choice on Magnus, Merle, and Taako. Why would he? Their characters didn't have that kind of weight behind them - and when they launched this game, they weren't attempting to develop characters with that kind of weight behind them. And then the guys grew into their characters, and their backstories got fleshed out, and they all started to actually genuinely care about it all, and they saw how genuinely invested their fans were getting and it made them get MORE invested, and now Magnus and Merle and Taako and a boatload of Griffin's NPCs are genuinely beloved characters and millions of people are dying to find out what happens to them. And even more than that, Travis, Justin, and Clint have themselves become obviously emotionally attached to their characters. And then Griffin found himself in a situation where the entire, pre-existing narrative foundation of the show, which was developed for his brothers and dad to make boner jokes in while pretending to be adventurers, now hinged on totally rewriting the backstories of fully realized and beloved characters who were essentially 'written' by other people without any knowledge of that backstory. And he was going to have a drop a bomb on all three of them and the entire audience and say "...um, actually, the versions of Magnus Merle and Taako you have fallen in love with are not the actual Magnus Merle and Taako, so now you all have to start playing them as essentially different people with different skills, life histories, relationships, knowledge, etc." I mean, jesus, can you even imagine? Once it became clear that the show had evolved beyond the initial concept and Griffin realized all this, he must have started absolutely scrambling for some way to avoid essentially overwriting and erasing all of the main characters. 

If the show today was still the show it had been back in Gerblins, I think Travis, Justin, and Clint would have been like "woo, awesome, we're space explorers now, what a fun surprise, let’s get on with this final boss battle!" But now it's like, "what impact does this reveal have on the way that my lonely childhood created a foundation for my fundamental distrust of others?" There is no way Griffin could have predicted that this would happen. And so he came up with this flashback arc. And I am 100% on board with it, because I personally think it's a great way of threading the needle and giving Travis, Justin, and Clint the agency over their characters which the IPRE reveal would otherwise have taken away. Griffin couldn't have just told them "you lived out this 100-year journey and now you remember all of it" at this point - he had to find a way to allow them to actually live it out themselves, and to have their actions during that time matter in some way for the story going forward, in the most efficient way he possibly could. And I have enough confidence in him at this point to believe him when he says that the outcomes of this flashback stuff will actually affect the final showdown. Of the three of them, I think Travis grasped the purpose of all this the most quickly, because he immediately turned himself into a recognizably less mature version of Magnus, in a deliberate contrast to his recent character development. To me that shows that he's embracing the idea that these flashback episodes aren't just exposition dumps - they're a chance for the players to form their own 'memories' rather than having them foisted on them by Griffin.