#others are welcome to add their perspectives i know ive discussed the acoc finale with ppl in replies/dms/etc. before

[olreid]

hey I've been really loving your neverafter analysis - it made me feel like i wasn't complaining about nothing lmao and you word it much better than I could

so about that, you've mentioned the acoc finale a few times & if you have a post about that or any kind of commentary, I'm really curious to read it

<3 i dont think i have any posts from when i watched, ive deleted most of my acoc posts over the years bc they annoyed me lol. ive gotten several questions about this and will do my best to explain what i mean! it's not going to be super detailed due to i havent watched that season in literally 3 years but basically i just remember the very end of the acoc finale being really like. tonally jarring because the players were saying all this insane stuff about consolidating political power but it was being framed as a happy ending not only for the party but also for their subjects. the vibe was like, well it was tough going there for a minute but now the Right people are in charge, so it's all good now :) just no acknowledgement of the inherent violence of governance via monarchy, which again may be stupid to expect from the dnd comedy show, except for the fact that the content of the season was like. a painfully extended enumeration of The Violences of Monarchy. but i guess we learned nothing :) like let's just read from the wiki briefly about the events of the episode post-siege:

Cumulous asks Liam what is glowing in his pocket. Liam without hesitation eats the seed from Lapin Cadbury. He thinks of the change he most wants to see in the world and wishes that the creativity and magic of Candia would burst forth, and instantly Candia quadruples in size within its place on the Calorum map. Saccharina thanks Liam as the new queen of a lot more Candian land. Far off, Liam hears Lapin chuckling […] Lapin whispers to Liam on his way out, “There’s nothing wrong with being a seed guy.” A new age of Candia is born as Emperor Amethar of the House Rocks embraces his new title and brings a new age of peace to the realms […] Liam brings the Pontifex and Sir Keratin back to life in an act of mercy and locks them in prison for the rest of their lives. He leaves them, and goes back to being a seed guy […] Saccharina tries to find Cinnamon an alternative food source to Bulbian hearts, looking through all of Vegetania before returning to Candia. Just outside the castle, a tinfoil tree grows and a cranky Cinnamon eats the fruit from the tree and then grows gentle, regarding the world with love instead of hunger. 

all of this is soooo stupid and shoehorned to me... why is liam wishing for candia to grow four times larger besides that ally the player thinks that would be a good thing. WHY is liam resurrecting dead people and throwing them in jail framed as 'quirky' besides the fact that they have essentially already rolled credits and so are just ready to frame anything that happens as funny and nice because they don't want to like. get into the politics of it.

and that's not even getting into the rest of the wrap-up where like. all the bad stuff, all the outstanding conflict and tension that would naturally linger after the battle just gets done away with completely for the sake of an ending that is not tainted by even the faintest hint of complexity or violence (again, this is revealing and tells us a lot about what the table considers violent vs. what is so normalized as to not even register as violence in the moment). rather than having to grapple with having raised and domesticated a pet that feeds on people in a time of war and then still being responsible for that creature after peace has been declared, cinnamon is magically transformed into a creature that now only needs the fruit of trees to surivive. the events of the season usher in a reign of peace rather than a rocky period of distrust and repairing alliances or even open rebellion because that is the happiest ending for our royal protagonists, not because it necessarily follows logically from what took place in the finale.

all in all i feel that what the acoc finale wants to convince me of is that the season's conflict was largely a case of good vs. evil individuals rather than complex people caught in and trying to exploit violent systems, and that as long as the good people win out and have the space to rule as they want to, monarchy is not opposed to concepts like happiness or justice but indeed is highly compatible with them. we just needed a good king!!! earlier in the season it felt like there was space to question monarchy's claims to moral authority, particularly through saccharina's abuse and the outsider perspectives of her crew of outlaws. however, by the finale all of this critique has been subsumed into the narrative machine and we're back to cheering for the rulers of candia in their noble pursuit to conquer ever more land, something we hope they achieve because they have shown themselves to be pure of heart and sound in judgement. this was not a actually a forum to question whether a small group of unelected wealthy people should be allowed to govern just because they want to, but rather just an extended job interview for the rocks family, and they have passed with flying colors. anyway.

the reason i compared this week's neverafter to this particular acoc episode is that i think we are again seeing some of the limits of the table's political imagination, particularly as it relates to incarceration; imprisonment has been invoked repeatedly through the device of trapping people in timothy's book, which is either framed as a good or bad thing depending on whether it is done by a protagonist or an antagonist. if the authors or the fairies trap the characters in their respective stories, it's an abuse of power that must be challenged. however, if the party traps an annoying or superfluous npc, or a meddling princess, in their handy portable prison, it's (a) benevolent; the possibility has been raised that trapping characters in this way makes them happy, and may indeed be a way to give them a happily ever after; or (b) violent, but markedly less so than other available courses of action and thus merciful by comparison. there is no space to discuss the inherent violence of incarceration or entrapment even if it is used as an alternative to death, which IS INSANE in a season where the horror that kicked everything off was the horror that what the characters thought were their lives was actually a prison made of narrative.

across these two seasons i think we are seeing an inability or perhaps just an unwillingness to contend with the inherent violence of being held against one's will. the problem for the party seems not to be that characters experience various levels of incarceration by virtue of being trapped in narratives, but rather that the wrong people have been imprisoned while those who truly deserve the punishment roam free. the party, our protagonists, have been trapped in story despite their inherent goodness, while the true bad actors -- the fairies, the princesses, the gander -- are allowed to roam free. according to this logic, simply capturing and imprisoning everyone who advances a plan the party doesn't agree with will be a satisfactory outcome and should be enough to set the world to rights.

tldr it frustrates me as a viewer when d20 seasons make a point to explicitly raise and explore structural issues only to "solve" them at the last minute with individualist fixes that do nothing to address the root cause of said issues. it adds insult to injury when they try to tell me the ending is a happy one simply because it made the party happy, even if others had to suffer for that to be so.