#a crown of candy spoilers

[heytherecentaurs]

I love Fig and she’s my favourite but if they do Fantasy High Senior Year without her, I trust Emily. She’s never let me down before. Prism Grimpoppy was on CR for a handful of episodes and I totally fell in love with her. With 10 episodes she completely endeared me to Chirp in A Court of Fey and Flowers. In A Crown of Candy after Jet died she gave us Saccharina one of the most interesting, traumatized and complex Intrepid Heroes characters. If Emily has 20 episodes of Fantasy High, she’s going to make me love her new character. I’ll miss Fig and her shenanigans. But I also think I’m satisfied knowing she’s out there living her happily ever after. (Even though I’d have liked to see more of what that looked like for her and Ayda.)

[copper-ice-cube]

of fucking course the sugar plum fairy's lair is the FREEZER

the rest of calorum is the fridge and when people die its food getting eaten by the hungry one

but the sugar plum fairy steals spirits away to her mountain lair so they don't get eaten!

aka putting them in the freezer so they're dead but not eaten yet!!

and when she dies lapin says all the spirits have to go to the hungry one!!!

and there is imagery of the heat of the old dragon's lair melting lapin and all the sugar plum fairy's treasures away!!!!

aka frozen food being defrosted/reheated to be eaten!!!!!

fuck fuck fuck of fucking COURSE!!!!!!

[asymptotic-rage]

In an alternate universe where they go back to their canon timelines after the quangle, in the moment that Liam sends Preston to help Lapin, does he think about that weird day where an orange fairy told him Preston would die? As he watches the axe come down, does he wonder if there was another option? Does he wonder if Preston’s death is his fault?

[chungledown-bimothy]

that con save when the crown touched fabian was to keep him from getting quangled out for amethar, right?

dgmw i loved every moment of fabian's beef with pete, but y'all. amethar and lapin reuniting in a world where lapin's sacrifice wasn't enough? them being forced to face a world in which amethar the unfallen finally fell, dooming his whole family?????

amethar having to process what happened on the ramparts without the option to personally kill calroy. if revenge is off the table, what the fuck does he do with his grief?

love the comedy we got, but i do a little bit wish we could have gotten the heartbreak and drama.

[nichetheorist]

Time Quangle Spoilers

Bonus:

[easays]

In some ways, I wonder if Tula is Brennan's chance to revisit some of the feelings Caramelinda struggled with. Both are women who lost their partner and had to deal with the fallout in ways that asked them to de-prioritize their own feelings and well-being.

At some point for Caramelinda, pushing it down meant trying to love Jet and Ruby in ways that prepared them for the heartbreak and hardness she dealt with without letting them into the hurt yoked around her own neck.

Tula, I think, shows us how kind and gentle and loving that desire to protect can look like before it turns brittle and alienating between parent and child. Caramelinda kept her love for Lazuli buried; Tula is burying her kids in her love for Geoffrey. At the center of both, I think, is a simmering wound and anger.

Caramelinda's was dragged out of her by a greater grief; I can't help but wonder if Tula's, too, will only fully emerge after she loses something more precious than her husband. Or will Lila and Jaysohn lose her and inherit the way she holds her anger under wraps? Will their love of her turn into a memorial clouding the anger underneath until it's too late for them, too?

[ech0thegeck0]

Its time to sob about a chocolate rabbit and a tiny peppermint pig again!!!!! wish me luck laddies lasses and lassos!

[thelongestwalk]

the double life of primogen fettucina alfredi

(hd images for a catalogue of candy: https://acocfictionzine.carrd.co/)

[itsgonnagetinspiringsoon]

Rewatching ACoC and

[itsjustevil]

Ok but "For every universe where we are friends for even for even just a day, I am grateful" is so emotionally destroying, especially knowing what happens in the canon timeline.

[adainesfroggieboggy]

i sometimes fully forget caramelinda, ruler of candia and the sugar lands, dutchess of meringue, bulbian and devout, is a wizard. she learned magic from the archmage. from her wife. from lazuli. caramelinda, queen of candia, had spells!

she’s very overprotective and worried about her daughters using magic but that’s because lazuli did magic and she’s gone. lazuli was the archmage of house rocks and she’s dead. if magic couldn’t save her, if the hungry one consumes the most powerful wizard candia has ever seen, why would she allow them to tempt fate?

caramelinda is the former wife of the archmage. she doesn’t hate magic because of the bulb. she hates magic because it’s useless and she’s seen that firsthand.

[heytherecentaurs]

I think about Siobhan as Ruby Rocks after Jet’s murder, crying and shouting, “BRING HER BACK!” to the Sugar Plum Fairy a lot. “What is the point of having magic if I can’t… BRING HER BACK!” Then the quiet broken “…please.”

If you lost the person you loved most in the whole world wouldn’t you beg and bargain with a supernatural being in order to bring her back? And how would it feel to know that a being as ancient, hallowed and powerful as the Sugar Plum Fairy couldn’t rectify such an injustice?

Death isn’t just permanent. No. A deity far greater than any, a being called the Game Master, put this path before you and your sister knowing there was every chance someone would die. This supreme deity, a god higher than the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Hungry One and even the Bulb above planned how he would kill your sister, made the enemies that killed her, invented the dagger that scored the killing blow, and if he could’ve, he would’ve taken you as well.

He wove the thread of fate into a tapestry of danger, death and despair and he sewed it into your life and the lives of your family. Call him Destiny. For he arranged the world and its circumstances to take your aunts, attempted to kill your father and stole your sister. BRING HER BACK! No. The Sugar Plum Fairy can’t. No one could. Not because death is a terror too severe to survive but because your god is a greater horror than you could possibly fathom.

[dropoutconfessions]

This is a SUPER spoilery confession so here is your warning to scroll if you want to avoid nsbu, neverafter, acoc, and trw spoilers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So I don’t know if this is the case with all of Brennan's campaigns since I've only seen and finished the forementioned ones, but one thing I've really disliked about all of them are the endings. Not like the final episodes, but the last ten minutes or so, where everything is wrapped up in a neat little bow. Which is what I don’t like.

Brennan has a trend of making the endings really sweet and sugary. I know it’s comedic, but c'mon, the characters get their happy ending immideatley.

For acoc and neverafter, which are the darkest and grittiest Brennan-led campaigns so far, the cartoonishly happy endings feel especially jarring. He and his players like to explore deep and complex themes and conflicts with his players during the game, but as soon as we hit the epilouge they speedrun the last remaining chunks of character development and everyone lives happily ever after, very literally. It’s a little bit easier to buy with nsbu since the whole campaign is a crackshow but the pattern continues nonetheless.

Which. I get that that’s the point. They’re comedians at the end of the day, and they can wrap up their stories how they want. But... would it hurt to have just a liiittle bit of bitter with the sweet? Like, does everything have to wrap up neatly? Brennan goes out of his way to make sure everything is absolutley prefect in the end, which is probably really nice for the players, but imo flattens the story to the ground.

I think acoc is the worst offender, for a couple of different reasons, one being the amounts of unresolved trauma that was within the group at the end. Just a line like "it takes time and a lot of trial and error, but the Rocks does stay together as a family and get a little better at loving eachother each day" would have gone such a long way instead of: yup everything is fixed and they’re all happy now. Also revivification is suddenly possible, tf is that about. And also! The campaign started after a "happy ending" and showed how everything didn’t automatically fix itself after the war was won. Why stop there? Why not carry that over a little bit to the end?

Ok this became a bit more of a rant post than I intended. The endings don’t have to be tragic, I just think it’s good to leave a story on the '...', whether it will continue or not.

And, personally, i do like a little tragedy. Shoutout to The Ravening War

As a fellow tragedy girlie, I completely get that, fucked up ending me beloved. I do think D20 has a couple things blocking it from doing it right every season

Seasons with heavy themes of tragedy are emotionally tough on the cast. By the end of Neverafter and A Crown of Candy (especially ACOC), the whole cast was fucking tired and stressed out of their minds. In Adventuring Parties for ACOC, Lou straight up admitted that he picked up smoking cause of that season, and Siobhan and Emily were in tears on camera. By the end of it, it's likely that's all they wanted.

The themes of Neverafter lent themselves to a non-tragic ending given the pcs won. The whole culmination of the story was the pcs getting free will, which means their victory meant they all got their wish. They literally gave everyone the ability to give themselves a better story, it's hard to make that tragic without cheapening their victory.

And the same goes for A Crown of Candy. The campaign ended with Liam basically casting Wish. Generally, a DM does Wish fuckery when there's more campaign, if you're pulling that shit where it goes wrong at the end of a campaign during the wrap up when you have no plans for a sequel? You're an asshole.

And speaking of sequels, tragic endings make people smell sequels in the water. If a campaign's epilogue has a bit of tragedy in it, it typically lights the fandom up for a sequel. And it definitely happens with d20 shows, given how much speculation there is for a Fantasy High Senior Year. Generally (probably to avoid rabid fandom) they avoid sequel bait, especially with A Crown of Candy. Ravening War is immune to a lot of these factors given it's a shorter season so there's less emotional wear and tear, the story was designed to possibly end poorly, it's a prequel so sequel bait isn't an issue, and the players honestly remained pretty fucking powerless on a world scale the whole time because they were never supposed to deal with the largest problems of the world.

But yeah no, in general, I'm not super big on the epilogues either, the last one Intrepid Heroes one that I really liked was like, Starstruck or Unsleeping City II.

[chungledown-bimothy]

Lapin healed Liam for 5 in the single turn he was alive.

Liam escaped the cathedral with exactly 5 hit points.

[myhamartiaishubris]

Ok I need to ramble about Lapin for a second because like. He isn't mourned. Liam is busy grieving for Preston, and he's hellbent on getting revenge on the carrot, but it's not for Lapin. Theo might have mourned him, but he's immediately hit in the gut with Jet's death, which devastates absolutely everyone in the party. Because everyone loved Jet, and Liam loved Preston, but nobody loved Lapin. His death is sandwiched between two others. What must that feel like, to be unloved by your allegiance and an apostate to your order. Abandoned on both sides. Serving a patron who only asks of you and never gives. Fully prepared to make a villainous monologue and Thunder Step Liam out of there. Lapin saved two people in that fight, Theo and Liam, and both of them are busy grieving someone more important than him. What must that be like!

[copper-ice-cube]

Main D20 Seasons Ultimate Ranking: part 8

(Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI)