#CR C3 E119

[deramin2]

Travis: You ever tried to stop a train?" Taliesin: "Not in a while."

Reminded of one of Taliesin's young adult acting roles was an indie film with no safety precautions where he was supposed to grab onto a moving train. He had longish nails until a failed take tore them up.

[deramin2]

Robbie made this comment while wearing a tank top and it made me so cold.

I had to put on a third pair of even thicker wool socks during the episode to thaw my toesicles while already dressed head to feet in wool knits.

Dorian must either run hotter than a furnace or be made of sterner stuff than I can fathom.

You think THAT’S COLD? I’ve been wearing

CHIFFON

for WEEKS!!

*~mwah~*

[deramin2]

Meta: Bell's Hells Plan: Self-Determination for Exandrian Mortals

Bell's Hells keep repeatedly saying what their plan is out loud, so I'm surprised it's still a mystery to so many viewers:

Bell's Hells want the Exandrian Pantheon to no longer have control of Exandria.

After much debate and talking to a lot of people, they've concluded that the Exandrian Pantheon having nearly unlimited power and control over Exandria is bad, and it needs to end. They've considered all the good those gods do personally and through their institutions and concluded the harm outweighs it. Exandrians deserve true self-determination, and they can't have that while the Gods treat them as pawns.

They don't want Ludinus or the Ruby Vanguard to have that power instead. That was definitely going to make an even worse situation.

Their preference was to reason with Predathos about eating them and instead let the gods leave. That plan is clearly not working. While talking to the Raven Queen they formed a new plan to undo the gods' divinity, the thing Predathos wants to eat, and allow them to live as mortals with much diminished power and control.

They do not have a plan for what mortals do with their freedom once they have it. They took so long to commit to this path because it means the full overthrow of global power structures, and that's a really big and unfair decision for one group to make for everyone. But in their heart of hearts they feel like those institutions are so corrupt they have to be undone so something else can grow. That something else will still have problems, but different ones. They were thrust into the position of having to choose revolution or the status quo that just kicks the can a bit farther down the road until that inevitable overthrow, and they couldn't stomach kicking the can. As is often the way with major change.

This is not a story about good and evil. That framework doesn't fit around the events being told. It doesn't explain anyone's actions or motivations. Even a softer binary of altruism and selfishness doesn't fit. It's all too muddled in every single choice. Because that's reality. This is not heroic fantasy. They've said out loud the entire campaign they're not heroes. They're normal people thrust into impossibly large decisions and the story is about the changes that come out of that. Almost all the media influences they cite are stories about change, not morality. (Kentucky Route Zero is one example.)

People keep trying to order a milkshake at an art gallery and then complain the paint water is a bad milkshake. Milkshakes are great, but not every place you go makes them. And since the cast have repeatedly talked about what kind of story they're telling for years, the mismatched expectations aren't on them.

The thing that's kept them coming back to Exandria after nearly 10 years is that they get to see how all their actions, big and small, changed the world. Taliesin planted guns into a fantasy world, Matt added on that tech escaped Percy's control, and now it's a major political force in the world and Percy just has to live with that. Travis sees a big red button and he longs more than anything to press it just to see what happens. Matt made an entire Campaign 3 of big red buttons. They're not trying to protect the world from their decisions, they're trying to see what happens when they make interesting choices.

(I think the doubt about making the "right choice" is largely driven by the hostility of the audience to interesting choices with messy consequences. Especially the women who have faced a ton of misogyny-amplified criticism for every perceived "mistake" they make. But that's a different meta.)

They all know that an age is ending, and big changes are coming to Exandria, no matter what they choose. It's only a matter of whether they try to steer the runaway train or give full agency over to people they trust even less. Matt has said he now sees this as an end to a trilogy. Remaking the world to fully separate from WotC IP and probably switching systems to Daggerheart makes a lot of sense for both creative control and business.

Matt and others have reshaped these deities and their institutions away from WotC's versions pretty strongly, but they still by their very nature exert control over them as independent creators navigating the unfathomably vast and powerful cosmic horror entities that are mega corporations like Hasbro. Taliesin's closing remarks at the Candela Obscura: Circle of the Silver Screen live show are about how the Hollywood machine eats people. I wrote about the symbolism in my essay A City Made of Aspirations.

Just this week, and after Matt said "Fuck AI!", Polygon reported that a student project had used their work to build an AI Dungeon Master using a data set created by Microsoft engineers out of fan wiki summaries and the linked transcript database maintained by Sil. Geek & Sundry used fan captions, so a significant amount of the caption work in the data set is fan labor. Critical Role switched to professional captions as soon as they went independent because they saw the value in that labor. Those same fan information labor projects have allowed them to be the most academically studied AP due to the ease of collecting information, which has added to their success.

They're beset in the real world by forces that want to devour their aspirations to maintain their youth. They barely escaped the wreckage of one such entity in 2018 with their Critical Role work in hand, but a lot of their other innovative shows like Sagas of Sundry were lost. The system that propelled them into the spotlight and has allowed them to chase life-long dreams they thought were impossible, has also been trying to devour that work. They've fought for worker's rights through their union for a good reason.

Campaign 3 isn't a story about good and evil, but it is a struggle for who gets to control the future. It's about overthrowing the hegemony of systems whose manipulative, selfish, and destructive influence outweighs the benefits they provide. Even if that's confusing, terrifying, and a known sacrifice. Ludinus was a piece of shit, but he wasn't entirely wrong. Tragically the worst person you know occasionally makes a good point.

There are only two ways to solve a problem: do what you're doing better or do something else. Campaign 3 is the story of ordinary people who have decided the world needs to do something else. They found themselves in extraordinary circumstances through a series of decisions they couldn't know the outcome of. They don't have a firm idea of what they want the new world to be or how to achieve it, but they do know that things have to be different. Sometimes that's all the seed of change you get to work with.

On the Wednesday Club episode Love is Love (2017-06-28) Taliesin put it, "Culture is not a rocket ship. We all don't get on the rocket ship to the planet culture and go up to the moon. Culture is like life: it is chaotic, it is violent, it is hungry… It is not normal for everything to just keep getting better all at the same time. It's normal for everything to get better over a period of the long game. In any internal point, chaos—"

That's often how the world is. Most activists don't know what happens after they win their battle. They can't predict what knock-on effects anything from legalizing gay marriage to forcing the military to clean up Superfund sites will have. We don't know what happens next when the lead industry is overthrown, or tobacco companies are forced to admit their product causes cancer. We didn't know what movies would be made after the Hayes code or what effects streaming would have on film, television, and music. Early researchers into generative AI had no idea it would get used this way. We don't know the future or if what we're doing is "good" or "bad" on any long timeline. We can only choose what's in front of us one decision at a time and just hope we don't live to regret them too badly. That's what Critical Role has always been about.

Now is the time for different people to choose their own fates, for good or ill, without the Exandrian Pantheon dictating them. Whatever happens next is for Campaign 4 to sort out.

—

This essay is also available on AO3.