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centaurianthropology · 1 month ago

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'EXU: Divergence' is the Series I Didn't Know I Needed Right Now

I’ve now watched ‘Exandria Unlimited: Divergence’ fully through twice, plus the cooldown multiple times, and from the beginning to the end of the first episode it hit me like a sledgehammer. It's probably the most brutal EXU to date, and it is also somehow the most uplifting.

It's such a departure from the other Calamity-era EXU series in the best possible way, and I wish we could have an entire longform campaign with this cast in this time and place.

Spoilers for episode 1 of EXU: Divergence below the cut.

‘Calamity’ was a tragedy in the most classic sense: powerful people at the height of their strength who damn the world in their hubris. ‘Downfall’ was also a tragedy in a different way, a family of gods coming together briefly to save themselves, but at what cost?

But ‘Divergence’ is a story about ordinary people. As the gods play their family games, and the powerful vie for even more power than they could ever use, and hoard wealth and resources beyond what they would ever need, these are just five people trying to get enough food and water and rest. Trying to survive in a world that acts first as an oppressive prison and then in indifferent chaos as the gods fight above them.

They're not even Level 1 adventurers. These are level 0 nobodies. NPC stat blocks. They don’t have classes; they have jobs. And in each of these people, we see the true heart of what good people can do in desperate and damning times.

I want to talk about all these characters, because I love them so much. I love the story they and their rolls are telling.

Nia isn’t a cleric with magical healing; she’s a nurse with some herbs and bandages and a little knowledge. Hell, in a world where misery is endlessly and pointlessly perpetuated by the games of the powerful, she’s not even a healer. She’s a repairer of bodies. She keeps feeding them back as grist in the mill, because what else can she do?

She can hope. She can believe that change is coming. But more than believing in it, she can act toward it. She can enact tiny acts of rebellion and kindness. Because maybe she is just repairing bodies, but she will desperately overreach and overplay her hand to try to buy them a little more time, a little more comfort, a little more light in the darkness.

She's young and naive, but her hope is still chosen at every terrible moment. Even when she falls into exhaustion, having prayed over her sister's locket and received nothing in return, Nia still chooses to act. She chooses to get up and, if water isn't coming to her, to go looking for it instead. She is doing better than the others, even if she's not doing well. And so she goes. She looks. She sees a friend die, wishing with his dying breath to see the rain.

And it rains. Not, to her mind, because a god walks across the world before her. Even if she sees the god, she's not looking there. She knows that Starmian made the rain. She sees the acts of people good and bad. She sees the power in hope.

Garen isn’t a fighter or a druid; he’s a stonemason with one arm and a hammer. And he’s a man who has spent so long under the boot of oppression, so long being ground down into nothing that he’s learned never to hope except when exhaustion takes him so fully that he forgets not to hope. That's when he can still see the faces of his family, instead of the prison he's lived in for so long he built most of it.

He is a character we meet in complete despair, but he's also the first to move past it. As soon as the opportunity for action arises, as soon as there are people in need, Garen takes his old and tired body and makes it work for people he’s never met, simply because an injustice is being done to them. Because he’s been waiting for longer than he can remember to stand back up after being beaten down. When he brings his hammer down on a guard’s head, when he breaks through a wall to save a bunch of dragonborn he’s never met, when he insists that they will not leave children to die. This is a man remembering what it is to stand up.

He wants to save everyone, well beyond what he's currently capable of, because once hope is rekindled he clings to it. He believes firmly that if people who can help others don’t do so, then what is the point?

Fiedra isn’t a rogue; she’s a gang leader with the ability to talk her way out of trouble. She also isn’t nearly the altruist that Garen and Nia are. She acts out of self-interest because that was how she’s survived as long as she has. She has a roach tattooed on her arm. She is a survivor, someone who can worm her way into a position of slight privilege even in the worst prison imaginable. And when she’s starting to feel the effects of exhaustion from their march north, she sneaks a meal from their dwindling food stocks that no one else gets. Because that is what a survivor does, even if it hurts others.

But she's also not so simple. She only eats the cheese after she checks to make sure her friend isn’t becoming exhausted as well. Because as much as she knows how dangerous it is, Fiedra cares. She shows it again and again in her interactions with Crokas, how she drops everything including her position of privilege and relative comfort in the prison to try to break him free.

Crokas is her family; her gang was her community, and she cared for them fiercely. And now all she has is Crokas (because the dice tell an amazing story, and those terrible rolls were incredible for her character development). So she looks after him. She jumps to his defense when it’s revealed that his breath weapon doesn’t work. She talks him up, tells everyone how great he is, explains things to him when he doesn't understand.

She’s not to the point where she’s capable of expanding that compassion out beyond the two of them (“The best I can do, kid” was a hell of a line). But she’s making steps in that direction. She survived a hellish march with these people. When she and Crokas found Starmian’s body she was the one who immediately asked where Nia and Erro were. Sometimes, when the shit hits the fan, all you can do is care for yourself and those you love. Learning to care for more than that tiny sphere is part of part of reclaiming the best of one’s personhood in the worst of times, and part of finally building a future instead of just surviving now.

Crokas isn’t a barbarian; he’s a massive bodyguard in way over his head. He has no idea what’s going on most of the time. He has an intelligence stat of 6, and he’s stuck in a world that keeps upending itself on him. Maybe he understood how life worked in a city with his gang and with Fiedra guiding him. Even in Rybad Kol, the worst prison imaginable, a man as massive and imposing as Crokas probably did all right, especially with Fiedra talking the Roaches’ way into running the Slop.

And then every dragonborn in the prison was taken to be carted off to die for a goddess he’d never heard of, purely because they were dragonborn. He can barely even understand that he’s part of a singled-out minority group, and certainly can't grasp the machinations of gods.

But he can see that, in the cart with him, there are children. And when they escape he might not understand how this happened. But he understands that this long march toward some hope for a future is currently killing them. They don't have food or water. Their feet are damaged for the rest of their lives by this endless walk north. It is SO BAD.

But he notices when those children start to become exhausted, so he walks like a monitor lizard with them riding on his back.

Because that's what strength is for.

Not to rule. Not to hurt. To lift up those who can’t stand, and carry them. Crokas may not understand what’s going on, but he understands what needs to be done, and what he can do. And the fact that he starts carrying those children, taking penalties against his constitution saving throws at the end of every bad day on the road, right after Fiedra ate that cheese in secret? The look on her face says it all.

Erro is not a ranger or a druid; he's a mapmaker who has survived for far too many years seeing far too many horrors. He is clearly almost as old as Garen, and is far more stubbornly jaded. Their lives have both been destroyed, but all of Erro’s travels, everything he’s done has ground him down to basic survival. He is practical, but still not cruel. Liam said in the cooldown that he’s been on a teeter-totter between simply surviving to live another day, and the thought he could even hope for a better world.

He’s not there yet. He’s more like Fiedra in his fatalism, even if he's not as openly cynical. And yet he still follows Nia when she goes out with Starmian to find water. He still looks after her, just like Fiedra looks after Crokas. And like Fiedra, he sees in Nia the hope he tries to smother in himself. Starmian dies, as Erro knew he would, because he’s seen dozens of Starmians.

But then the rains come. The gods give and take and take and take and give and take. The world is a cruel place, but he still watches a younger, more hopeful person fall to her knees with the rain in her hands as she cries in thanks.

I am immediately and completely enamored with these ordinary people living through extraordinary times. I can’t wait to see what becomes of them, how the world shapes them and breaks them and how they might lift one another and a community up out of the rubble.

I didn’t know how much I needed this right now. Because it’s SO BAD, but the very first word in the very first episode is hope. And more than hope, these people are embodying acting in tiny ways to build a better future. I know that myself and a lot of people have been watching the enshittification of the world around us and feel like ants under the feet of uncaring, cruel tyrants and gods. Like their games always lead to suffering, and they either don’t care or actively enjoy that part of it. And it's so easy to give in to despair, to become convinced that there is absolutely nothing that can be done.

But we are all level 0 ordinary people too. And we can still hope. We can still take acts of defiance and kindness, great and small. We can stand up again when we’re knocked down, even when it hurts. We can help those we love to live day to day, even while we can take what steps we can to build and lift up a larger community. We can live through hell, because even in that hell there will be moments of exquisite beauty and joy.

Because maybe all of us can find the rain.

#critical role #exu divergence #exandria unlimited: divergence #brennan lee mulligan #matthew mercer #liam obrien #celia rose gooding #alex ward #jasmine don #rei'nia saph #garen #fiedra marrow #crokas #erro mordaurum

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