#also i wish people were nicer to the dawnfather purely because he made vex his champion back when and vex is my ultimate fave

[the-grey-hunt]

i've been feeling a little put off by the newer orym-laudna-ashton crew episodes, but it's a weird feeling that people in the fandom seem to share re: the whole godly plotline

as someone who is religious (polytheistic; i call it norse heathenry), the way Matt is approaching gods and sprinkling in smaller non-god divine spirits (such as the werewolf one that possessed chetney) is interesting, but i'm mixed on how the players are reacting to it. tbh i think they're just very culturally christian, but i wanna try and work out how i'm actually feeling about it all, though i've seen other, better meta posts on the subject

gonna put this under a cut because it's getting long

i think i'm mostly annoyed that the gods' followers are taken as the same thing as the gods doing a thing? i know in a d&d world these followers are literally getting magical power from their gods, and that certainly has to mean something, but at the same time, humans and other d&d sentient species have free will. that's the whole point of an improv game. the gods don't control their every action, and i would hope that the gods don't take your power away if you aren't a cleric/paladin in the One Approved Way there is to be a cleric or paladin.

i suppose that some of this relies on how matt sets stuff up (the mention of dawnfather *missionairies* really threw me, because that's a *very* christian concept), and partly how the players react. the players, who i assume are largely not very religious irl (idk about sam who's the only one i've heard discuss his religious background), tend to react like "well, that won't really affect me".

hang on, i've had a realization. i realized the main thing my brain is stuck on is we've listened to so, so many people talk about how the gods are bad, whether rural people who want to be left to their own worship or the "release predathos" gang, but we've had very few people who have a thorough, passionate, POSITIVE opinion of the gods. we haven't been presented with the option of the gods being good and helping. THAT'S why it feels weird. the players are ambivalent and only orym seems to remember that ludinus had to murder people to get away with his plan without people disagreeing with him, the guests are largely ambivalent about the gods (even deanna, which is fair), and matt has presented them with a lot of very strongly anti-god people.

it's not that any of these characters are wrong for their opinion. it's not that the gods *have* to be actually good and morally pure. it's that all these characters, NPC and PC, making the choices that seem right for them to make, have skipped over the part where they try to figure out what role the gods actually play in the world, be it the living world, afterlife, or basic function of the planet's biome (this post: X has a great take on that laid out more concisely than i could)

honestly, i think "are the gods good or bad" is reductive at best, but if i were at the table, i'd be asking things like "well, if the dawnfather gets eaten, does the sun go out, because we need that" or "if the raven queen gets eaten will there still be an afterlife"

#critical role #meta #working out my feels before monday when i catch up on the newest episode #i wanna know what matt is trying to set up here #does he have an endgame idea for how the gods are going to be portrayed? #also i wish people were nicer to the dawnfather purely because he made vex his champion back when and vex is my ultimate fave #don't be mean to vex's boy #(among her many other boys lol)