#i think there are valid reasons to say. like imogen but not caleb. but there's also a lot of not valid reasons.

[utilitycaster]

In all seriousness, I think one of the most obvious parallels from past campaigns to Imogen is Caleb, and while I've talked about the reductive ways people have interacted with Caleb in the past (Sad Boy hours and whatnot) it is frustrating how Imogen is so frequently denied the same complexity. Caleb was traumatized, and lonely, and nearly friendless but for one person he'd met under difficult circumstances some time before joining the larger party, but he was also (for the most part) allowed by the fandom to be exceptionally violent and brutal in combat; to be angry at all the time he had lost and at the people who'd taken advantage of him; to have possibly questionable goals; and to, at times, work against the better interests of the party in service of his own priorities. He was allowed to fall down and look ridiculous and to be immensely powerful but he was also allowed to be far more than that dichotomy. And, most importantly, and to be fair this was somewhat more hotly contested, he was allowed to claim responsibility for his actions and to exist in a space where he was both a victim of manipulation and willingly made his own choices based on that manipulation, and still be worthy of a heroic status.

Imogen is so frequently denied these opportunities and this complexity- and not by her detractors, but by her claimed fans. She's allowed to be a failgirl who falls down the stairs and she's allowed to get the HDYWTDT but she's not allowed to be the person who deliberately triggered the traps to light up the rivals during the museum heist. You can't explore how cold she is to her father or how she grants her mother undeserved leniency - that's unkind to Imogen. She's not allowed to bear partial responsibility for how people in Gelvaan treat her, even after she nearly killed several of them. She's not allowed to have powers that are a liability or that intrude upon others' privacy; it's only allowed to be explored as her pain and nothing more. Her petty and bitter asides are either made out to be badass mic drops or conveniently ignored. If she wants to explore her darker tendencies it's bad unless she's doing it with Laudna in which case it's good. Her powers have, understandably, left her with fascinating gaps in her communication skills, which is a great point to be made about psychics, but that's neglected when so many people act as if it's everyone else's responsibility to accurately interpret her. It's impossible to explore how her worldview is often very focused on herself without a strong sense of the larger picture - not even self-centered, though it can be, but often merely limited due to her own sheltered experience - because within many fandom circles, every other character's morality is judged based on how far backwards they bend to accommodate her.

#caleb widogast #imogen temult #critical role #critical role spoilers #i think there are valid reasons to say. like imogen but not caleb. but there's also a lot of not valid reasons. #anyway. i said this elsewhere but female characters are allowed to be keyleth or delilah #but nothing in between. if you fall in between you are pushed to one end or the other by people who claim they love women's wrongs #it is ngl wild to see people throw keyleth under the bus though. i thought that might be the limit but apparently not #to be fair people also managed to do similar flattening to keyleth too...very wow look at this complicated woman! she has all two emotions!

[utilitycaster]

The wildest part about people being mad on Imogen's behalf is Imogen herself understood Keyleth's position in spite of her own wishful thinking, helps acquire the blue flowers for her, was the first to acknowledge the Changebringer's help, and the first to say "I'm sorry" to Orym losing more of his people. I'm really baffled to read these "Orym is manipulative" takes and that it was dangerous of Keyleth to validate his anger. Do you think it goes back to the god stuff, or is it just Imodna?

I think a little of column A, little of column B, little of several other things. Since I've been on the "hey could we consider that Imogen and Laudna are adult women who are responsible for their own actions" train for over a year, the specific "Imogen can be mean-spirited as well as unintentionally insensitive" train since at least this past February, and the "Orym is correct and Bor'Dor signed his own death warrant by casting Vitriolic Sphere at a group of people who were not violent towards him" train for a month, let's break it down.

There are a small handful of people in the fandom who just really hate Liam. Per a very salty rant I put into my drafts shortly after 3x63 to describe this type of person, it is a small, scattered, bizarre group of people who for no apparent reason have decided to be foaming-at-the-mouth levels of furious because, as far as I can tell, a nerdy Gen X-er dad who went to Tisch is kind of corny sometimes. Anyway nothing he does will ever sit well with them so we can ignore them forever. Moving on.

Some is Imodna; I thought the whole issue of Imogen and Laudna as agency-less infants against a cruel world would have been ameliorated by them entering a canon relationship (one currently compatible with the 2013 Pinterest board vibes of fanon no less) but it appears to have not been the case. For more on this, see this still relevant post and, while I personally haven't ever written something up, there's just, again, a complete black hole of empathy from a segment of the fandom when it comes to any of the other characters; my post from this morning about Imogen as compared to Caleb touches upon it. You know the Far Side cartoon where a guy is talking to his dog and the dog only recognizes a small handful of words? I feel this is similar, like, they see that Imogen wanted one thing and Orym and Keyleth wanted another thing that wasn't even, as you point out, terribly incompatible, and then the "well if not thing Imogen wants and not 100% deferential to her then BAD BAD BAD" attitude kicked in.

But I do think, in the end, a lot of it does come back to if not the gods exactly, the idea that the Vanguard is, unmistakably, the enemy. They are not the revolution here to usher in a new era of rule by the people. Keyleth is not here to raze Vasselheim to the ground but to have a diplomatic discussion; neither is she here to grant any leniency to the woman who attacked Vax regardless of her connection to Imogen. And she finds the idea of a world without the gods, regardless of her own personal feelings, to be one to be avoided. [sidebar: I hope we get Matt on 4SD; I am wondering, after the one-two-three punch of Hevestro, the Raven Queen, and Keyleth all placing a heavy thumb on the scale opposing the Vanguard if he did not expect the party to be as conflicted about the role of the gods and is trying to wind up an argument that I think as of last episode reached the end of its useful life.] When you couple that with Orym's positive attitude towards the gods, that explains the animosity towards him.

The undermining of Orym's position over the past few episodes has always been one of emotion. First he was not objective - as if anyone else was objective! As if any moral decision is ever 100% objective! We all have biases! What kind of early 2000s atheist forum shit are you on to claim perfect rationality that conveniently matches the ideas that apparently came to you in a godless vision? It's insane. Then it was his grief; grief makes you irrational (unless you're Imogen grieving Laudna, in which case you are objectively right at all times, even as you shout down every other suggestion, beseech Laudna's first murderer, not a month later consider the potential validity of the her second, and try to to undo her immutable past) and remember, moral decisions must be made by the rational. Then it was his impatience (nevermind that Imogen has absolutely no patience). And now it's his anger, and he's apparently been manipulating the party the whole time by...having suggestions for the group which he mentions, and openly stating what he was feeling and what he wanted, and not intuiting that Laudna reawoke Delilah with his approximately no magical ability and then encouraging her to finish a job she had started herself. Because god Rational Objective Conceptual Being forbid women do anything; it is the role of the man to protect their fragile souls from all consequences.

Even more generally I think a lot of people- not just in this fandom, though certainly within this fandom - are terrified of anger. Like, they think they like it - they say they love barbarians (though rage is its own beast and I think very different from the anger Orym and Keyleth exhibit) but most of the discussion of them tends to veer more into angst, and most players of barbarians are often exploring emotions like grief, self-pity (as Ashton says), or frustration just as much if not more so than anger. I think a lot of people perceive anger as this awful thing inside them to be controlled and denied, or alternately to only be let out for whatever they think is a sufficiently righteous cause, and instead sit in an increasingly toxic stew of simmering resentment and conflict avoidance until they begin to think this is not just normal but aspirational - anything but that awful beast they call anger. It's not new in discussions of Keyleth, and it's not limited to her and Orym; I can point to nearly every single character who has had even the slightest of outbursts - even something as mild and controlled as Orym's whispered profanity or less - and I promise you there's been pearl-clutching for every single one of them.

Anyway, you make great points! One of the things that struck me about this episode and prompted my frustration and my post earlier today is that Imogen has changed. I think she's been mulling over Liliana since her appeals to her during the Key's activation were unsuccessful; she hesitantly told Chetney when he asked in Uthodurn that yes, if Liliana's death is necessary, she understands; and I think seeing the utter devastation and pain that was inflicted on Keyleth brought it into focus. She was much more open to FCG and the coin as well. And, you know, if one had embraced Imogen's moral ambiguity in the leadup to the solstice, and the possibility that she could betray the party, instead of shouting that down? Then one could see this as a beautiful moment of growth for Imogen. One could, in fact, if one was so inclined, attribute it to her new sense of ease thanks to her circlet, or even to her nascent romantic relationship. If one, of course, had wholeheartedly embraced Imogen's past moral ambiguity and the possibility of her betrayal.

#answered #Anonymous #critical role spoilers #critical role #long post

[utilitycaster]

Orym for the trauma ask. Besides the fandom's treatment of The Nod, one discrepancy that really stuck out to me was that in the middle of all the 'Orym is consumed by vengeance and that's terrible BS' was going on, we saw Keyleth explicitly vow revenge against the Ruby Vanguard ("The last thing that I saw, before the light took us, was someone important to me. Someone I lost long ago. And I will do everything in my power to destroy them who did this.") and I didn't see anyone giving her shit over it, even though her anger is directed at the same people and comes from a nigh-identical place. Was it because Vax, unlike Will, is someone the audience knows and his orbification happened onscreen, and that forced people to recognize how awful it would be to expect her to calm down and Be Reasonable™ about the whole thing?

throwing in the anon who asked me about Orym in general.

I think the core problem is again that this fandom has a truly awful track record re: people who lose romantic partners young and more generally about people who are grieving. That is the more useful Keyleth comparison; it's gotten better but the post-campaign meta for C1 (that I saw about a year after C1 had ended, after I had binged it) truly just treated Vex and Keyleth as boxes of grief and grief alone instead of people with lives marked by but not ended by tragedy. Once Yasha said she had lost her wife people started treating her notably differently; again, we had the people claiming Orym would be happier had he stayed dead despite Liam explicitly saying death felt like a failure; and this is ultimately the core of lifespan angst and why I find lifespan angst mostly tiresome. Like, Essek will outlive Caleb by centuries! Keyleth was, even had Vax lived a full and long life, going to outlive him by over a thousand years! Unless you die very young you will outlive someone you love. It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, but like, this fandom (and probably others) truly seems to treat grief as a life-ending thing for the grieving rather than just the dead. So that's the big problem re: fandom response.

The other is that Orym gets thrown under the bus for Laudna a lot, for some reason. That's where the "Orym would be happier if he were dead with Will" came from and that's where the dumb discourse about the nod came from. It's just people who cannot abide by the idea that bad things can happen to Laudna and that she can do bad things deciding to pin it on Orym. I also think that Liam explicitly said on 4-Sided Dive that Orym could not be objective about this, and because they are very stupid and cannot understand things that are not explicitly spelled out, they could not put together that, for example, Imogen, whose mother is deeply tied up in the Ruby Vanguard, cannot be objective either. Ashton just nearly exploded due to a critical lack of objectivity about the situation.

Sort of as a companion to talking about Caleb but I think Liam makes his characters' trauma and how they feel about it fairly explicit and plainly stated, more so than most in the cast, and this is an entirely valid choice but I think it means that, for better or for worse, people who lack the skill to interpret characters whose feelings and motivations are not quite as clearly laid out will gravitate to them to make their arguments, either for or against them.

#answered #rhowena #cr tag #orym

[utilitycaster]

Do you have any more examples of the shadow blorbo concept in the CR fandom? I think I have the general idea but I don't fully understand.

Sure! I think one I've mentioned before but not on those terms is how frequently people take Caleb and Essek's relationship (canonically long-distance and non-traditional) and overlay either "adventurers consistently living together, often even on a ship" (Fjord and Jester's relationship) or "domestic, with children" (Beau and Yasha OR Veth and Yeza) on it such that technically the stories are about people named Caleb and Essek, but they are actually telling a story that fits the characterization and canon of one of those other ships.

Another is how frequent it was for people to act like Beau was the arcana expert of the Nein rather than Caleb; or give Caduceus extensive post-canon adventures that are absolutely not in line with his largely homebody depiction but would fit several other party members; or how, as I mention, it's really common for ship fics/meta about Imogen and Laudna to for some reason randomly have Ashton there in an extremely prominent role and often as like...a confidant and voice of reason to them both; or how I also have previously stated that people often assign a really fraught and painful history to Imogen and Orym that is far more extreme than their canon, but would be apt for the more tragic backstories of FCG, Chetney, Ashton, or Laudna.

I suspect it comes from people often having a favorite character or ship for reasons of demographics, aesthetic, or the actor playing them (which to be clear is as valid as any reason for liking something) but then finding either that they don't actually love the character's personality or story, or merely that they relate perhaps more strongly to a character who does not fit those qualities. And instead of saying "oh hell yeah two blorbos" or changing their mind, they either will insist on their favored ship or blorbo as their favorite while spending like 90% of their time talking about the character they claim NOT to like, or they'll try to merge or graft or copy-paste the personality and story they prefer from the "shadow" to the character they claim is their favorite.

#answered #Anonymous #cr tag

[utilitycaster]

my not at all specific Travis-character desire: elf wizard. any kind of elf, any kind of wizard. it’s a classic for a reason, I love elves, and I think Travis has the creativity and tactical sense to really run wild with the massive wizard spell list.

my moderately specific Travis-character desire: I think you’ve said you’re not a fan of rogues, but an elf wizard with a 1 or 2 level dip into rogue would let Travis be a little more flexible with a squishy caster. You don’t need to remember to cast mage armor if you have corporeal armor, and since wizards often have their bonus action free, they could use cunning action to avoid getting hit. But the main draw is to take expertise in history or arcana just to be hyper-competent in a specific skill. As an audience member, I want any one of them to take expertise in history just to wring all of the lore out of Matt as we can possibly get.

my wildly self indulgent Travis-character desire: I want Travis to play a very attractive character. I want everyone to always make it a point that his character is very, very pretty. And every time someone flirts with Travis’s very attractive character, he will turn them down, explain he’s not interested, and people will so “oh, there’s Travis, refusing to do romance again in this campaign.” Wrong. As we learn more about Travis’ character, I want to find out that they are happily married with to a lovely spouse they are devoted to, with a beautiful home and a loving and supportive family. It would be funny, it gives Travis another opportunity to be a troll, and we’d see Matt and Travis flirt again.

I think I'm giving this a B overall:

Elf wizard is fairly popular as a prediction, but also, imo, fairly good.

Elf wizard with rogue is actually kind of worse for AC; leather armor is at most 12+dex whereas mage armor is 14+dex. We see this already with Imogen and Laudna, where Imogen casts mage armor and has an AC of 17 whereas Laudna's AC is consistently 13. Arcana proficiency would be great but we did pretty well on arcane lore with Caleb, who just had a high intelligence and regular proficiency.

I'm of two minds on the last part; here's the thing. Travis...openly did not refuse to do romance last campaign, and indeed initiated it in the end. Like, yes, this is something he was pretty adamant about not liking earlier on, but people change! People have hang-ups they work through! I think it's valid if he doesn't want to play romance this campaign, but anyone who says "oh he's refusing to do romance again" is like, not very good at knowing basic plot points of the show and has been living under a rock re: CR since 2018.

That said, Veth and Yeza was a fantastic relationship that I really loved watching and I'd enjoy seeing a different perspective on a character who for some reason has chosen to adventure over staying home.

#cr tag #travis pc watch 2021