#like brennan in acofaf

[bruqh]

conspiracy brain prediction for new d20 season:

i think aabria is gonna climb up on the table at some point

[kipper-face-penny-bottle]

Oscar Montoya’s ability to show up, immediately understand the assignment, and take initiative is UNREAL.

[screamingblogger]

finally found the clip that Evan and I talk about constantly

[icy-moons]

Translation: Sometimes, you need a friend to talk to when you're at work, especially about some recent tender feelings that were neither expected nor prepared for. It has been a bad time, and everyone who says it will get better is lying. I cannot sleep. It has taken me forty-five minutes to write the past four sentences.

[scoobhead]

every time brennan's a pc on dimension 20 he's like alright. i WILL be playing the saddest and most heartbreaking character of all time. it WILL be a perfect play into and subversion of genre trope. and there WILL be a pc/pc romance. and every time i'm like yes thank you mr mulligan and i gobble it up like iced creams

[jackklinemybeloved]

rewatching the first episode of a court of fey and flowers and it’s so funny to me how everyone talks about how ruehob was just like a flip that got switched in episode 2, meanwhile in the first episode oscar is mostly silent for all of the PC intros except Hob’s in which he asks many many questions such as

“how tall are you? how tall is the average goblin? so you’re very above average? 😳 are there any other goblins this tall? have you always been this tall? or did you get a growth spurt?😏” like the chemistry is IMMEDIATE oscar KNEW he wanted to fuck that bugbear

[worstversionofme]

After spending so much time watching dimension 20 I seriously don’t think I’ll ever be able to tolerate regular tv. My little gay heart has never seen this kind of queer representation in tv and it is nourishing my soul. And queerness is never the butt of any joke and the characters experiencing and figuring out their sexualities isn’t always sad and dramatic.

I have never related to something so much. This silly show of just a bunch of cool actor friends playing D&D has probably changed my life: I feel like I know who I am better now???

I am eternally grateful to Brennan Lee Mulligan and literally every person involved in Dimension 20 for giving us this show and this outlet to figure ourselves out. Also gonna be eternally annoyed with Dimension 20 every time I have to watch a straight romcom - give me gay wizards and fairies and candy people any day

[gunnerchanel]

brennan literally sits there like this until he has something to say during adventuring party

[takaraphoenix]

HOLY SHIT the power Brennan Lee Mulligan's game play wields!!

He really just made eating a peacock feather romantic. Damn.

Not only does he keep creating these wildly weird characters that are inexplicably lovable, but oh that Hob/Rue hits hard for me.

[counterspelling]

Endless ACOFAF For anon!

[cianmars]

The straightest duel

[obeetlebeetle]

when is honor not honorable? when it is prescribed by a system of nobility that perpetuates itself through the destruction of its subjects. 

rue watched hob sit there bleeding, arrows in his back, waiting until they nearly pierced his lung to remove them -- all for the honor of the goblin court. for the courts. for the system that stole rue as a child and twisted them into a pleasing shape, a desired doll. for the system that has used hob’s body on the field of battle and rue’s body in the field of politics to the benefit of the system, not the bodies being used.

rue spent every interaction with hob this episode saying, Are you okay? Are you hurt? Does anything about your life of service actually make you happy? Are you ever happy? Will you ever let yourself be happy? I hope you will. I hope you find happiness. I wish it was with me.

and then at the very end hob goes, I was miserable until you held me.

hes finally able to say it but the issue is, rue never needed to be told that hob loves them. they clocked it. they know he wants them. so finally learning how hob feels, that doesn’t change anything. what they were really saying is, Can you admit that service makes you unhappy? Are you capable of prioritizing desire? I am offering you devotion.

as long as hob pursues honor as prescribed by the court system, as long as he plays the political game, he can never love anyone. least of all rue; rue who has been so damaged by their obligation to the court of wonder for so long. rue who has chosen to use all their power to dissolve political bonds and facilitate emotional ones, at the hope of destabilizing the system. rue who has finally revealed themselves as both a monster and a dissident, prompted by their love for hob, in a show of force -- they are finally rebelling, openly, against the court and the system that tried to cannibalize them. and they’re watching as hob commits himself more deeply to the goblin court, putting his body in their hands for both battle and marriage.

rue tries tirelessly to get hob to answer this question. You are unhappy; what is it for? Tell me so I can understand. and hob’s response is, I choose to be unhappy because otherwise I would be wrong. 

his defense of the court system is that it tells him what to do. he believes himself to be so fundamentally incorrect that his wants, desires, and instincts cannot guide him -- the only way to be a good man is to serve something greater than himself. this belief, as we can see in his conversations with boil and blemish, has been reinforced through scorn and humiliation. 

hob says, I choose this unhappy life because it is right to serve. I know that it is right to serve because those in power tell me what is right. I know I am wrong because they tell me I am wrong.

upon learning that rue dissolved the marriage between apollo and grabalba, the thing that hurts him the most is the feeling of being used by rue. of being taken for a fool and manipulated in a political game, of falling in love with someone that doesn’t care about him. but even as this misinterpretation wounds him, he tries to defend his service to the goblin court.

and all rue ever wanted was to show him that his life of service is just a matter of being used, being taken, loving those who do not love you but only what you do for them. they wanted him to see that the pain he feels at the perception of  being manipulated by rue is a pain he has felt at the hands of the court system for far longer than they have known each other. 

hob’s real answer can be found in both what he has said and what he’s unwilling to say. For what? Nothing. Not even love. so rue offers hob what the court system has always denied him.

honor, service, obligation, duty -- everything hob has hinged his identity on and everything he ever believed to be good, to make him good -- are tools, not ideals. the court system designed fealty so that it would be easier to exploit people like hob and rue, people that feel like monsters, people who are empty and need to be filled. rue sees that hob believes himself to be a monster, and they aren’t asking him to change that. they know that monsters will always know themselves to be monsters. instead, they are trying to convince hob that being good is not what he thinks it is, when it’s being defined by the court system.

when is a monster not a monster? when you love it. when what is monstrous is worth loving. in their last attempt to wrest hob from the court system, rue tells him they love him, and in the same breath they tell him that love and honor are not the same. rue tells him that they are a monster. that in seeing him, they finally realized that being monstrous isn't being damaged; the damage comes from elsewhere. so they ask him to see them outside the moral structure that has been imposed on him and that he imposes on all others. they ask him to see the ways in which that structure and the system that created it have wounded them for being monstrous.

in doing so, hob would have to acknowledge his own wounds. he would have to acknowledge that he has been wounded for a very long time. that is what he has been resisting; if at any point he had acknowledged his wounds, he would have needed to care for them, and hob is not equipped to care for himself. care is not something afforded via lines of support in the court system; care was never part of the conversation. but when rue speaks of love, and divests it of honor, they offer, instead, care.

this is a love story.

[mccoyquialisms]

one of my new favorite dnd things is getting to watch Aabria and Brennan try to 5D check mate each other in real time

[scoobhead]

captain major knickolas pnackolas hob knows himself a coward. by self-imposed restriction, he can no longer accept medals of valor or courage. he has been happy once and believes that's all he's ever going to get, all he ever deserves to get. his best friend is a horse. he believes himself to be a blunt instrument. he can only live a life of service. he is a soldier. he no longer knows what he is. he does not know that he is loved. and his name is KNICKOLAS PNACKOLAS

[lesbiansforangusmcdonald]

All of us: “Oh man, they got a lot to unpack in Adventuring Party tonight, I wonder what they’re gonna cover.”

The Pack of Pixies:

[stonecoldsilly]

episode ten we’re finally gonna get the ruehob pvp we’ve all been waiting for! when we said hootgrowl endgame we meant combat to the death didn’t we guys?