#oh the days when i occasionally saw drama float by and didn't give a shit

[nellasbookplanet]

Rambling a bit about critical role and fandom attitudes under the cut, because I’ve had a lot of Thoughts lately and the only way to get some peace and quiet inside my own head is if I take those thoughts and Put them Somewhere Else.

So I think the critrole fandom is probably the first bigger fandom that I’ve been actively involved with, and it has suddenly made me realize why people talk about fandom as a sometimes very tiring thing. Before this I’ve usually only  entered fandoms way after they stopped being active, or was only very peripherally involved, or the fandom itself was super tiny. When getting into a new show/book/movie I usually look up common criticisms of it, partly out of curiosity, partly to see if there was something I missed. Sometimes this will give me actual thoughtful meta, sometimes it gives absolutely bonkers takes, but I’ve always felt far enough removed to just go yikes and back slowly away whenever I stumbled on drama.

With critrole I’m suddenly involved As It Happens, and for some reason it hits a lot harder than stumbling on it several years later. For the first time I’ve actually felt the need to block people, because my habit to look up criticisms led to me stumbling only viciously toxic blogs where any valid takes where drowned out by pure drivel and hate.

And I think that’s what probably upsets me a little. There’s no middle ground. Either people are claiming the show is beyond criticism to the point of harassing anyone that doesn’t agree, or they’re actively looking for problems and blowing anything they find out of proportion while pretending their personal opinion is 100 percent objective and acting like a dnd show can be critiqued following the same guidelines as other media.

Like, what comes first to mind here for me are the people who accused Liam of being homophobic for doing m/f romances when playing bi characters (to the point of calling it a pattern, even if it has only happened once; Caleb is, after all, still single in cr2 (and don’t get me started on the “pretends Essek is evil to avoid doing m/m romance” when Essek's alignment is literally evil, no pretending involved)). And it’s like, I get why this is frustrating, but it’s also such a viciously bad faith take that ignores the medium it’s being played in. In the case of vaxleth vs vaxmore, it really isn’t so strange that he chose a pc/pc pairing over an npc/pc one; it gives a lot more chances for interactions instead of just popping up every now and then when they happen to visit the right city. Same thing when it comes to cr2, with the bonus that Caleb developed feelings for Jester way before he even met Essek. And cr2 doesn’t really give him the option of m/m pc/pc romance, since: Molly (dead), Fjord (played by Travis, romance averse except with his irl wife) and Caduceus (aroace). None of this is the kind of stuff you'd have to take into account when critiquing a movie or tv show, but a dnd show is a fundamentaly different medium.

Another take I’ve seen is that Beau being a woc is only for brownie points since there’re no real life asian influences in her character or background, or that Keyleth should’ve been a woc since she’s canonically from a mixed background. These are interesting takes! But when delivered as Objectively Correct while ignoring people saying they prefer Beau as she is because they don’t want to see a white woman role play their culture, or ignore that cr1 started as a home game, not a planned tv show (I doubt it’s a coincidence that Keyleth and her player look visually similar), well. The interesting takes drown under the Need To Be Right.

(I could also talk about the bj vs by discourse here, but I’ve already made a post about that and I don’t have the energy to do it twice so I’ll sum it up as: bj was given unfairly little closure, but by didn’t “come out of nowhere”, the two ships simply have wildly different dynamics, one being best friends to lovers, the other being seeing and falling for each other from a distance)

And all this sucks! I see so posts that makes me want to Discuss but people’s need to either be aggressively “optimistic” and ignore criticisms or viciously hate on anything they don’t like under the cover of progressivism make me keep away and stay in my curated corner. I just miss being able to look for meta and criticisms without drowning in toxicity, bad faith takes and ship wars.

#i'm not actually expecting anyone to read all this lol #i usually don't talk much on here but sometimes i simply need to scream into the void #i miss being far removed from fandom... #oh the days when i occasionally saw drama float by and didn't give a shit #i just wanna look at pretty art and read interesting discussions #cr discourse #critical role #nella talks cr