#I'm not posting more about Hugh because I haven't seen much of Hugh outside of his relationship with Paul

[utilitycaster]

I feel like people don't vibe with Aabria's world building because it feels a bit incongruous (?) with Matt's world building style, in that Aabria's style feels much more rooted in our world. I haven't seen too much dimension 20 but I was thinking of your post about D20 mapping much more closely onto our world and Aabria's style feels more like that as well? An example would be her describing the casino as a 50's Vegas casino. Curious on your opinion on this!

The short answer: I don't know what other people think; maybe they feel like this but I don't. Outside of the Nameless Ones as an organization and the related plot/pacing issues they bring, the worldbuilding Aabria has done has largely been something I've enjoyed. It's certainly a different style than Matt's, but it does not violate what is available within the world. Also worth noting: Matt makes modern references constantly. In the most recent episode he compared the Twilight Mirror Museum to a house in the Goonies, and Evon Hytroga to both Doctor Strange and John Waters. This is just normal DM-ing. If you say "this looks like a 50s casino" your players and audience will know what's up and you don't need to describe every detail of a 50s-style casino. (The choice of when to do this is a really valid discussion that's WAY out of scope for this post but in short, Aabria does this, Matt does this, everyone does this, it's fine.)

The long answer: The post in which I talked about D20 mapping on to our world is not about worldbuilding in the sense of details like "50s Vegas style Casino" and much more about the larger cultural norms within the world. I was actually quite specifically vagueing (oxymoronic, I know) about people who overlay very late 20th/early 21st century US and more broadly western English-speaking (and frankly, often culturally Christian) social, political, and moral norms over a fundamentally different society like the Kryn Dynasty or the Menagerie Coast. Like...it was/is somewhat common fanon that Essek and/or Dorian had homophobic or transphobic parents, or that Jester had a very heteronormative idea of romance. None of this actually fits in the setting: Essek comes from a society that functionally cannot reasonably have a view of gender that exists in our world and we've never, to my recollection, seen any systemic homophobia/transphobia anywhere in Exandria, so the concept of heteronormativity is likely to not even really exist in the way it does in our world.

I also, and not to beat on one of my current favorite drums, find a lot of discussion of deity relationships and death practices in Exandria - and a lot of meta - to be super culturally Christian (even when, and, if I'm being brutally honest, especially when coming from people who were raised evangelical/right-wing Christian and no longer consider themselves as such). And this makes no sense, because like, the gods objectively exist in this world and you can talk to them.

Compare all that to D20, where the country of Solace and especially the town of Elmville in Fantasy High is explicitly supposed to be broadly based on John Hughes movies and suburban teen coming-of-age stories and Kristen Applebees does come from a sect that is a deliberate analog of fundamentalist Christianity; or to The Unsleeping City, which is an AU of our world. In these stories, there is homophobia and transphobia. (Also note: in Cinderbrush on Critical Role? There is implied to be some degree of transphobia, which, as it takes place in an AU of our world also makes sense.)

Like...if we were to transport the culture of the Kryn Dynasty into a world with cell phones or mid-century modern architecture, they are still going to have an utterly different view of gender (and romance/marriage/family/etc) given their relationship to the Luxon and the realities of the consecution process. That's what I was talking about in my post about CR vs D20: the absolute pillars of the worldbuilding that people often ignore for whatever reason, not the surface details.

#critical role #dimension 20 #exandria unlimited #critical role spoilers #(barely but like. technically there are spoilers)