maryallenc

[maryallenc]

Share your reunion widobrave thoughts please?? Only if you want to but I would love to hear them!

Apologies for how long this took to reply to! Most of that time has been spent trying to figure out how to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound utterly deranged, though conceptually, I understand it kind of is. So, for formality's sake, I am now donning my shippers cap, and am not to be held liable for making more thoughtful/thought out meta on this topic atm. Currently, we are simply living in the Widobrave Enrichment Zone™️.

Okay, with that disclaimer out of the way, let's continue!

Essentially, my widobrave thoughts re: the reunion are pretty deeply tied to whoever said during m9 reunited two-shot that Caleb and Veth were behaving like a divorced couple sharing custody of Luc, because it was a very funny, on-point comparison considering Veth would literally take Luc all the way to Rexxentrum (with Yeza holding down the fort at home, presumably, while they were both gone) regularly enough that Veth was stated as probably keeping spare clothes at Caleb's place. Like Caleb gets every other weekend with Luc and Veth or something. And that vibe to the Luc-Caleb relationship has persisted even seven years down the line to excellent effect. Like, I have derived an incredible amount of joy from Caleb's extremely concerned, angry, and fairly paternal treatment of Luc during the one-shot that really delivered to me the essence of "Caleb is Luc's father with partial custody and suddenly has to take emergency custody of The Child when he wasn't expecting to."

Like I said, none of this is necessarily meant to be productive, thoughtful meta, but it has brought me a great deal of joy and enrichment in my environment nonetheless. And, really, what else can we ask of our joyful shipper's minds but that?

[maryallenc]

"And Caleb, you know. I love you. And you're the second love of my life."

"I love you, too. Veth the Brave"

what if we were best friends.......and we told each other we loved each other and then you mold my body into it's true self with the power I helped you cultivate and we know each other entirely inside and out (literally).....jk jk........unless ??

[maryallenc]

thinking about her

heart in a cage playlist description you will always be famous

[maryallenc]

nott: oh this is caleb, by the way. he's the reason i'm alive. he's the second smartest man in the world, really, really great guy. he's helped me, saved my life so many times

caleb: I've heard so much about you. I've heard you really know your way around a laboratory

yeza: occasionally, yeah. gets me into trouble, it seems

*long awkward silence*

nott, for no reason: we're just friends! he and i are just friends, though

yeza, confused: I-I wasn't--okay...

[maryallenc]

it's so funny to me that caleb and veth really did just trade off the job of intensely pining for the other at like the halfway point of the campaign. like, imo, nott in the early days did not behave in any real romantic or even romance-adjacent ways toward him--I imagine it would be very hard to even think in that way when you hate what you look like so much, have such low self-esteem, and are actively lying about your entire past, including a secret husband. caleb, on the other hand, is kind of diving directly back into the sort of relationship he had with astrid and eadwulf. very close, very intimate, we-huddled-for-warmth-together-and-oops-it-led-to-something-else sort of thing. he is the one who expresses that he's fine with it if people think he and nott are romantically together when they're talking to keg. nott is the one who pushes back on that. he calls her his life partner. unknowingly, he compares his feelings for nott to nott's feelings for yeza. his behavior only really starts to change after he finds out about veth's husband because suddenly all of that other stuff is rendered inappropriate in retrospect. but even then he compliments her to yeza over dinner in the most awkward of ways, he admits to being jealous, he calls yeza "a lucky man" to have her, he stares at veth and yeza closed bedroom door for far too long, he creates an entire arcane tower with room for her family just so she'll stay with him. in general, his behavior is not, um, totally and completely platonic about it, you know?

like, veth's feelings for caleb are canonical and therefore indisputable in their existence, but caleb in the early days was not that dissimilar to how veth was acting near the end of the campaign. it really paints a picture of "right person, wrong time" in the way things just didn't line up for them. or, as veth would say: "in another world, maybe"

[maryallenc]

Character: is a white man. That’s it.

Fandom: how dare you dislike this femme-coded female-coded gay-coded disabled-coded mentally ill-coded icon

[maryallenc]

Just checking.... We all pronounce Miette like My-TAY in our heads, right?

[maryallenc]

Kristen "the greatest cleric of our age" Chilis Applebees

[maryallenc]

personally i am on team “oisin does legitimately have a crush on adaine and it is just slightly complicated by the plans to you know murder her whole party but like wow she has such potential for rage if she also dedicated herself to ankarna we really could rule the world together hey ivy don’t you think adaine would make an amazing rage driven wizard empress?”

[maryallenc]

Ok I'm probably going to regret reinventing 17th century European religious philosophy here but:

Ludinus's issue with the gods as stated to Imogen and Fearne (and I will state right now that we know he was lying or deliberately misleading at points in that conversation so I don't exactly take him at his word, but let's assume he does mean this) is that they did not prevent the Calamity. I have the following questions.

Does he have any loyalty/feelings about the Titans given that they would have killed all the people in the era of the Schism, ie, the gods averted that Calamity? My guess is no, which means that whole avenue of discussing the Titans was something of a dead end.

How should Calamity have been averted? The Prime Deities during the Age of Arcanum largely let people do what they wanted, which is what led to one of those mortals releasing the Betrayer Gods. Should the gods have struck down Vespin Chloras before he actually did anything, Minority Report style? Can the gods even predict based on the actions of a single individual or small group, because my guess is they can't, particularly since within the current stream of gameplay they absolutely cannot [ie, the reason the Changebringer can't tell FCG to stay or run is because Matt Mercer is the Changebringer and he doesn't know how people will roll; you do need to consider the medium here]. But if they could: so you think they should strike down mortals on the basis of thoughtcrimes? Or control them? In that case, why is Aeor a problem? There's a lot you can argue is justified once you permit the gods to override free will and kill people over mere potential for catastrophe.

On that note, Laerryn both was an unwitting architect of the Calamity (shorted on energy and then killed the Tree of Names, which served as a core planar defense system) but also averted the worst of it. Did the lives she saved by preventing the rise of Rau'shan and Ka'Mort outweigh the lives she took by destroying the Tree of Names? How should the gods have reacted?

Should, perhaps, the gods have all sealed themselves away earlier - perhaps post-Schism? If so, then the issue isn't the Divine Gate, now is it? Should the gods intervene or not intervene? Should they remove themselves or no? It feels like the issue isn't that they distanced themselves so that they can do less in the world, particularly if you wish to kill them, but that you really want to fucking kill them and they made that somewhat more difficult.

How do we know the gods (for example) didn't save Laudna? She was hanged and she's still alive; Morri would probably count this as saving her and I don't see the same desire to wipe out all Archfey. [real talk I find most discussion of Laudna specifically to be...incomprehensibly ignorant in its refusal to acknowledge that everything about it is player agency related, whether it's the story that the cast played out for Vox Machina or the decisions Marisha specifically made in creating the character, ie, do you think Matt should have said "well you can't play a Hollow One because that would mean the gods didn't save you" not to mention the fact that again, we are playing this within a game system where the existence Deus Ex Machina would in fact fucking suck ass; but even setting aside those reasons why this argument is stupid, it's still stupid. It's like a layer cake of stupid.] Again: do you want more intervention or less? Killing them guarantees less.

I'm assuming the problem with the Calamity is the vast loss of life, in which case, what's the math on how many people have been killed by the Vanguard or Imperium in the pursuit of unleashing Predathos? How many more will die?

If the release of Predathos doesn't result in the immediate demise of all the gods, and the Divine Gate is down, why isn't this a recipe for Calamity 2? What was the motivation for killing the gods again?

Should we kill mortal diviners who do not do all within their power to stop terrible things that may come to pass? If the issue is that some people have power without working for it, why haven't we killed all the sorcerers?

Should we be listening to a single word from someone who consumes random fey to live longer, and that's just the start of the CVS receipt of atrocities?

Is there a point where one's deeply held beliefs due to one's own personal trauma become invalidated due to one's actions as a result of that trauma? If so, why is the limit for Orym "is okay with killing people who are trying, directly, to kill you (which, frankly, isn't even a trauma response, that's just called not wanting to die, which I highly recommend as a personal philosophy), and gets upset when people defend those knowingly collaborating with his family's murderers" and the limit for Vanguard generals "family abandonment/just. buckets of murder of innocents./child soldier recruitment in multiple different contexts/eating fey as biohacking/destroying an entire city and the surrounding forest for hundreds of years (ongoing)/imperialism in multiple different contexts/I was going to make a gallows humor joke about how while neither exist in-world they've violated the Geneva Convention AND the IRB for testing on human subjects multiple times over but actually those both are in fact written in a lot of the same blood/probably some others that I'm forgetting"

[maryallenc]

i keep having this dream where your blood is turning my hands into river stones, and i keep waking up to pale white sunlight

✂️ commission info ✂️

[maryallenc]

[maryallenc]

vampire who’s married to an archaeologist voice: my love, stop trying to carbon date me

[maryallenc]

dang y'all

[maryallenc]

[maryallenc]

Hold on

Shuro was being a complete bastard until Senshi fed him then he offered to have someone rescue laios and his party.

Home boy was just hangry.

[maryallenc]

I'm sure a good contingent of them know already but I think it's going to be calamitous when anime-onlys find out Chilchuck is not, in fact, divorced.