#Lucretia The Adventure Zone

[cinnominbubble]

“You keep saying it matters, but you never say why and I don’t know if you expect me to just trust you on this one or what, but Taako don’t play that way. Make me care about your paper.”

(Monologue taken from Chapter 10 of Bury the Lead by @marywhal: Fourth Estate)

I genuinely believe that Bury the Lead is my favourite TAZ fanfic, and it’s not in small part due to passages like these. Allison has somehow found the perfect way to marry the heart and humour of the original podcast (including the live show which inspired this story to begin with) with genuinely thought provoking commentary that’s applicable to our own world. There’s a multitude of perspectives and growth in dynamics, and the entire world of Neverwinter Highschool seems to breathe and grow and live in all the best ways a story should.

I’ve cosplayed from BTL before, but was waiting to cosplay Lucretia specifically before posting any photos to Tumblr. She’s such an integral character to Balance as a whole, not to mention how important she is to me in a more selfish sense.

If you’re itching to return to those TAZ Balance feelings, I cannot recommend Bury the Lead enough. I revisit it as a story just about every year, and recommend it to just about every fan I’ve gotten to talk to about TAZ.

Below are some more of my BTL specific cosplays! You can find me and my cosplays on TikTok , Instagram, and pretty much anywhere else on the internet using the name cinnominbubble!

Image Description: Feffles cosplaying Ren Mol’diira from Bury the Lead. She is a dark elf with grey skin, short white hair, pointed ears and purple contouring and freckles. She is wearing a version of the Neverwinter High School uniform, including a white collared shirt, navy blue checkered skirt, blue and silver tie, and light blue blazer with asymmetric moon earrings.

Image Description: Feffles cosplaying Julia Waxmen from Bury the Lead. She is a human with tan skin, long, dark, curly hair, and freckles. She is wearing a version of the Neverwinter High School uniform, including a white collared shirt, navy blue checkered skirt, sweater vest in shades of blue, light blue letterman jacket, and red flannel with sunflower earrings. She is holding a notebook.

Image Description: Feffles taking a mirror selfie, while cosplaying Lucretia from Bury the Lead. She is a human with tan skin, dark hair in a bun, and round glasses. She is wearing a version of the Neverwinter High School uniform, including a white collared shirt, navy blue checkered skirt, light blue waistcoat, dark blue tie with silver striped, and golden moon earrings.

[twacn]

I think the best versions if this are "characters are preventable but plot is inevitable" and "plots are preventable but characters are inevitable". Like sometimes charcters will grow or change (for better or for worse) in ways that are in their control, and even if it doesn't change the plot, it still matters, it still counts, even if it's a tragedy. And sometimes the plot could be diffrent, its malleable, but the characters (and the combination of them together) will always lead to the same thing, definitionally the charcters very existence brings the tragedy

‘A good tragedy is always both preventable and inevitable’ is one of my main hills to die on. It’s literally so important to me. I’m fucking correct

[krowtesque]

some more assorted taz b doodles from my relisten

[yardsards]

the problem with taz balance is you first listen to it as a naive high schooler like "oh, funny dnd podcast made by those mcelroy guys i see in tumblr memes all the time! and they apparently have gay characters too! let me check this out! haha his name is taco that's so random XD" and nobody could have warned you that a decade later you'll still periodically think about lucretia and her martyr complex and be stricken with the urge to start gnawing your own limbs off

[crystallizedkingdoms]

ID: An edited screenshot of a tweet. johann the bard, @bestviolinistever, tweets: My boss told me the Relics keep eating her Reclaimers so I asked how many guys she has and she said she just goes to the surface and gets a new guy afterwards so I said it sounds like she's just feeding random guys to the Relics and then her gnome started crying. End ID.

mfw no relics after nearly a year of the BOB operating

join johann appreciation week you might find more of my weird johann&lucretia BOB fics/posts in the near future

[hopecorps]

lucretia adventurezones is genuinely one of the best conceived characters of all time and the tragedy that taako and by extension so much of the audience cannot forgive her for her selfishness driven by her steadfast belief in what is right and her immediate decade-long lonely punishment where thirty two years of her life were burned away from her, completely alone, makes my skin ache

i get to this point in the stolen century where lucretia is maybe 18 years old and also 100 years old, so dedicated to preserving life but terrified of living it, and i hear second-hand in less than two minutes about how she fought and ran and salvaged and nearly died entirely alone for an entire year when the six remaining people alive who have ever known her have been frozen into statues. we see her again and she is out of breath and sweaty and completely broken and relieved and changed forever and i think: of course she made that decision

of course she would do anything in the world to save her friends. of course she would take it into her own hands and be selfish and burn the world down and she would do it to save them. she would do it to save the world and she would do it to save the universe. it's so selfish and so unselfish.

and it's like. of course taako can't forgive her for making him forget lup. but i can also imagine years and years and years going by while the world descends into chaos and barry and taako nearly kill themselves and never stop looking for her and never find her. especially because if lup had made it back from that mission she would have immediately been there with lucretia trying to undo what they had done

lucretia is so beautiful and amazing and fantastic because she is the big bad the entire time. she pins them all against each other. she is who she warns them about. she got them into this situation in the first place. she cursed the entire world. she gains their trust by lying to them and she leaves them all so defenseless against the hunger until the second it comes for them.

but she was right. she was right the entire time. she loved them. she made sure they had each other even when she was all alone. she did the only thing that she knew how to do in order to save them all and she was right and she did it all out of love and it worked and some of them will never ever forgive her and she knew that and did it anyway. and i love her so much

[merualeden]

Lucretia Adventurezone they could never make me hate you

[v-poreons]

Been showing a friend taz balance for the first time (we are halfway done with stolen century at the time of this post) which means I'm listening to taz balance all the way through for the first time in like 7 years so I wanted to make myself some wallpapers for my phone's lock screen :] great opportunity to tweak my old designs for these guys and see my progress as a character designer since I was a teenager lol! alt text should have image descriptions if Tumblr logged them properly.

Bonus Fisher under the cut vvv

[mellowmaidenhairs]

and once a year i get obsessed with the show that got ingrained into my brain when i was 14

[bardspeak]

ITS LUCRETIA'S BIRTHDAY so before it ends here's the art i did for the Through the Static zine. it's free and a digital download and you can find it here yeehaw: link.

[theygotlost]

uh....... good morning. happy pride

[lithiumseven]

[vonkarmic]

oh taz balance how i've missed u

[mydaysaresmall]

This piece took over my life for a few months last year! Here she is my favourite girl.

This was done for @taz-balance-zine and you should absolutely go view the full zine FOR FREE here! It has been so inspiring working with all the amazing contributors and the zine is incredible I cried multiple times :P

[helimir]

revisiting the balance finale and I am completely fascinated by davenport immediately concluding that they need to leave on the starblaster and continue to the next cycle. that’s so wild. it asks you to confront the fact that, even though the stolen century was only a few episodes, it covers 100 times more time than the rest of the podcast. davenport is ready for these last ten years to be just an incident in a long list of incidents. he’s ready for another 100 years, however long it takes to figure out a better plan. the fact that it could bring lup back! the fact that if lucretia won’t agree, it’s better to kill her and talk about it next cycle if need be! the fact that none of them could stay even if they wanted to. the fact that davenport of all of them is the most willing to let the world burn. would he have waited to try and get the light from lucretia? would taako? imagine what the first moments of them reforming in a new planar system would be. holy istus i can’t stop thinking about it.

[raspberryzingaaa]