tinysluttywizardwaist

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

look man. look

essek saying "bren" out loud, claiming a position on caleb's side as the mouthpiece of his regards to astrid, did something to me. i can't tell if it opened a wound or punched me or gave me a hug. all i know is that i am feeling so many emotions right now

more under the cut because i'm about to get rambly:

"bren aldric ermendrud" is a separate character from caleb widogast. he's a young boy learning how to make magic. he's a deeply traumatized and indoctrinated teenager. he's the boy who curled up with astrid and eadwulf in a freezing tower for warmth all night.

essek never met bren. he met caleb and he's never known him as anyone else. if i'm remembering correctly, caleb never even said the name "bren" to him during the campaign, and neither did any of the nein.

essek knows caleb widogast. he knows the man who held up the object of his worst crime and then kissed him in the bowels of a ship and made a floor of infinite stars for them to walk through together. he knows the person who healed over bren's wounds—thinly, but enough. he knows the man that the boy has become.

astrid knows bren. she barely knows who caleb is. she still calls him bren after hearing him referred to as caleb repeatedly. she can't know him as the man he is, she only knows the boy. there's some of bren in caleb, but there is no caleb in bren.

essek saying "bren sends his regards" is him gauging astrid's reaction, on one level—if she freaks out, which she did, she's in opposition to caleb's cause and thus a threat. on another level, it's essek delivering a very different subtextual message from caleb: "the boy who loved you is giving you one final warning."

because essek is a threat to astrid. their last meaningful interaction was slinging spells at each other in the blooming grove. and that's funny in a "current boyfriend vs ex girlfriend exclusively fight each other" kind of way, but it's also deeply tied to caleb's recurring theme of transformation. "bren sends his regards" also means "i have healed enough to love enough for someone else to know this name and use it with my consent. and this someone else is your enemy. what does that make you think i've become?"

it also does a fantastic job of communicating subtle offscreen discussions that have happened over the years since the end of c2. we don't have the details of when or how caleb told essek his birth name, but we know that he did, and we know from all of c2 that the name bren occupies a place of immense emotional weight for caleb. it functions similarly to a deadname in terms of who uses it and for what purpose. trent exclusively calls caleb bren to wound him and place himself in a position of power. astrid calls him bren to remind both him and herself of who they used to be—same with eadwulf, though obviously he's not here.

the first time we hear essek say "bren" is on caleb's behalf and confronting one of the narrative representations of caleb's trauma. it's four words that manage to communicate "i, your enemy on a hundred levels, can speak for both the man i love and the boy who loved you, because i know him in his entirety."

astrid knows bren and essek knows caleb, but only essek can speak for both. because at some point, caleb gave bren to essek. and we know this from four words. four IMPROVISED words.

god. this moment is just so fucking good

#cr spoilers #fantastic meta

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

imagine. you are an deeply ambitious young woman in the rural Empire. you get a lucky break to go to the Soltryce Academy where you are hand-picked by one of the professors who proceeds to both favor and torture you and two others, with whom you become romantically entwined; he always does seem to favor one of the others over you. On the night of your final exam, when you poison your parents, that other student has a mental break, badly injuring you and you get him to the Vergesson Sanatorium. You continue on as a wizard assassin for years until one day, in your late 20s, he escapes. You hear nothing of him until he resurfaces when you receive a letter. He comes to see you. You talk. Not long after he and his friends are invited to dinner by your mentor and your mentor proceeds to offer the seat you thought was yours directly to him in front of you. He and his friends openly insult the mentor who has held you for years. You and your ex joke about racing each other to the top. You are then called upon to spy on them as they traverse Eiselcross for another Assembly wizard; they return to Rexxentrum and ask you to help them break into the asylum where your ex was once kept. You have a brief mental breakdown in an alleyway but you give them what they need. It does not go well and you are asked to chase them down but when you have them you find yourself letting them go. A few days pass and you track them down once more to a small temple. Your mentor is defeated and you are asked, after all this time, not to kill him. You leave in rage with your partner only to return when you realize you can have some small closure in testifying against him. You do so. Your mentor's seat is offered to your ex. He turns it down. It goes to you.

Seven years later the Assembly breaks from the empire during an era of mass unrest. You go and hide in a smut shop in Zadash. A group of fucking weirdos come in. One of them uses your ex's childhood name. They use every way they can trap you possible. When they finally succeed you realize they're being led by your ex's current boyfriend. You are pinned against the wall in a smut shop in Zadash. Every day Astrid Becke wakes up.

#cr spoilers #omg i was so hoping for the last sentence

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

I really really hope there will be at least one snide remark from Astrid about Essek's current state ("..so you are his messenger-boy now" or something like this), I would die for them throwing insults at each other.

#critical role #cr spoilers #astrid becke #essek thelyss #will i ever shut up about those two? probably not

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

From Critical Role C3EP94

There was a lot of hot people for Liam this week

#cr spoilers #omg thats awesome

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

Caleb is assembling a team and it's probably just every person he had the hots for once...

#critical role #cr spoilers #caleb widogast #its a big team tbh

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

"and genuine hot boi!"

#essek thelyss #cr spoilers

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

the girls are fightingggg (caleb’s war criminal ex & caleb’s war criminal bf are counterspelling in the back room of a smut bookshop)

#lmao #cr spoilers

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

fucking hell, no one has me in a chokehold like those wizards do....

#critical role #cr spoilers #essek and astrid holy shiiiiit

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

new Mighty Nein Art (x)

#critical role #beacon tv #the mighty nein #they all look gorgeous #yasha nydoorin #jester lavorre #cadeuces clay #mollymauk tealeaf #nott the brave #fjord stone #beauregard lionett #caleb widogast

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j

i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it's not only in him not being a real person that i can't look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don't exist. i can't study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i'll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i'm doing skin, especially green.

very excited to try doing Caleb next \o/

detail!

tip jar!

#essek thelyss #him

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

remember how young and scared we were?

#bloodweave #bg3

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

summary of the Bells Hells live show

#critical role #beacon tv #bells hells #this sounds so epic everyone have fun

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

I’m using ao3 the way god intended: via 36 open semi-abandoned tabs on my phone at 2 AM the night before work

#yeah

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

luxon stans wake up, new CR trademark logo just dropped

(x)

#critical role #essek thelyss #ok dont know if it has something to do with HIM but let me be delusional

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

I am making this wizard pile my agenda, and no one is taking it from me.

#very relevant to my interests #gale dekarios #caleb widogast

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

Something I think actual play is uniquely good at showing is, for lack of a better way to put it, narrative choice. You see the story that people decide to play out; you see the threads that people wanted to follow. You also can, if the GM shares their concepts, get an idea of some of the other possible paths not taken and stories not told, but ultimately they are untold. And finally, ironically enough for a medium with a random element, it makes creator intent unavoidably clear.

We see it all the time in Critical Role. There probably was a really fascinating story to be told with Vox Machina working with The Clasp following the fall of Emon. The party chose not to do it; we don't know what would have happened. I like many am intrigued by the Augen Trust path Matt had planned for the Mighty Nein; they didn't take it. We can't judge the story on what might have been, even if we find it interesting; we can only judge it on what was. And we don't follow the Clasp nor the Augen Trust as a result, because it's not where the PCs are; at most we might see the effects their actions taken without the aid of the PCs had on the world when their paths cross again. The camera, in D&D, always follows the PCs. You see what they see.

Essek was redeemed because the Mighty Nein wanted him to be redeemed. In actual play especially there's a weird tendency to switch to the passive voice to describe things one dislikes, but this choice was anything but passive. The party learned Essek had been lying to them and made their choice to remain his friends, and the story continues from that presumption, and while I am the first to reject the "but the cast liked it" argument, the fact is, one can't reject this redemption without rejecting the party's choice, and the party is controlled by the cast.

It's great to discuss paths not taken, and it's even true that you might believe those paths to be a better story. But you cannot rely on the camera - or the audience's interest and sympathy - to abandon the PCs desires and decisions just to suit yours. You can't do this as a GM, as another player, or as a viewer. Nor can you expect people to judge based on potential once it is no longer potential; a strong concept that is never followed doesn't count as the story; at best it counts as the GM or player's creative intent.

Actual Play forces people to take a story for what it is. I think the fandom can be so fraught because many people do not understand quite how it's limited in scope nor what is under GM control and what is not and so they act like choices are inevitable and inevitabilities are choices.

#cr #essek #yes

[tinysluttywizardwaist]

Burning in water, drowning in flames

#da2 #anders