#and vax background

[timaeusterrored]

(Vax’s mommy issues)

((Tw: mentions of addiction))

“I just think it’s a little convenient is all. She’s not there for nearly 33 years and suddenly she’s interested after he reveals his face? Do we even know if she’s his mother?” Vik asked, following Guadeloupe around the kitchen until she turned.

“Oh I’m quite sure. Even chromed up, V looks exactly like her. And trust me, Vik, I don’t like it either but he deserves to meet his mother at least once. Then he can chose to do as he pleases after.” She explained calmly, then shoved a spoon of soup into Vik’s mouth to shut him up.

Vax showed up a few hours later, trying to not look too excited and failing miserably. The sight hurt Vik’s soul. There was a feeling deep in his chest that this wasn’t going to end well.

“Is she here?” He asked, he sounded like a kid on Christmas asking if Santa came that night. Luckily, Guadeloupe best him to the punch to go with him. Vik watched from the kitchen as Melissa Kane stood to greet her son for the first time. She couldn’t even come sober?

Vik sat at the table, Guadeloupe joining him after a few minutes with a beer. They clinked their bottles together and waited, hearing the soft talking going on in the living room.

It too all of 30 minutes for Vax to go storming out. And Vik’s suspicions were confirmed. He watched Melissa try to follow, stopping just outside. She didn’t come for Vax, she came for V Eurodyne. Husband of a rock legend and a legend himself in the underworld of Night City.

“If you ever contact my son again, I will not hesitate to contact the police. I’d deal with you myself but I raised too much of a good person.” Vik couldn’t help but add that last bit. But it was true.

He was there when Vex had her baby, he was there when Vax woke up screaming from nightmares at an age too young to be having them, he was there for Vax’s first boxing match, taught him to shoot a gun and how to drive. And Guadeloupe was there to house him when V was too scared to talk to Vik about his own addiction. They raised V into the man he was today, not her.

He should call Kerry.

Vax was glad for one thing in the Villa, and that was the bar and the fact that Kerry only stayed here when he was making a new album, which luckily wasn’t now. He downed his second drink and went to pour another when a hand stopped him, silver wedding band sticking out against the golden jewel he normally wore.

He let the bottle get taken from him and sighed, feeling defeated. And hurt. And extremely vulnerable right now.

“She asked for money. Knew her all of 30 minutes, and she asked me for money.” He had hoped Vex would be wrong about her, that their mother would be an amazing woman who just made a rough decision. But no, she barely cared about Vax, only his last name and status.

“I’m so sorry, baby…” Kerry kissed his temple and led V to sit on the couch, then moved to make him an actual drink. Something he’d actually enjoy instead of just drowning in self pity for ever thinking his mother would be a good woman.

“I just… is it so bad that I hoped my mother would be a good person?” He asked when Kerry came back over with drink and made V look at him.

“Your mother is a good woman. That woman is not your mother, your mother is Guadeloupe Welles. And that is the best mother ever right there.” Kerry wrapped his arm around V’s shoulders and gave him a knowing look.

“She’s missin’ out on the most amazing, talented, kindest, and sexiest man alive. And if she was gonna use you for money, then fuck her. She doesn’t deserve to know Vax. She’s lucky she got to him. And she’s extremely lucky I wasn’t there.” She probably was, V had no idea how overprotective Kerry could be when they first met.

V took a drink and sighed. Fuck Kerry knew him too well this was amazing. He rested his temple on Kerry’s forehead, feeling him rub his shoulder.

“Still hurts… I spent years looking for her… wanting to meet her. And turns out she didn’t care about me or Vex at all…” he whispered. “I know I have Vik and Mama but damn I was so excited to meet her.”

Kerry nodded, simply listening to rant because he knew that’s what V needed. His merc didn’t need advice he needed someone to hear him. And Kerry would listen to him for hours if that’s what it took.

[liltaireissocute]

another perfectly fine evening in a local tavern

[PERC'ILDAN] + Vex thinks her brother is stupid (it's his normal state)

[shorthaltsjester]

sorry to say but i do actually think the focus tlovm puts on showing the workings and backgrounds of npcs is actively taking away from one of the main things that made campaign 1’s story compelling (notably. vox machina and their bonds with each other beyond the people they’re in love with)

[libby1080]

Vax Land of fangs, pitch and bones = Lofpab

consorts: termites

[natreidess]

They’re going out and Keyleth is better at make up 

[uvher]

I get lost But I always come around It's a strange fear Allows me to be found I'm loyal, oh oh, I'm loyal I'm loyal, oh oh I got the heart of a dog

Vax "Rook" de Riva [Muse Page] | [Rules]

[handbellanon]

.

[batshit-auspol]

So a bit of background first for our international followers: Clive Palmer is one of Australia's many mining billionaires who like to meddle in our country's politics, and as such he is utterly despised by all of Australia.

Picture for context:

He is most commonly known online by the title "Fatty McFuckhead", (problematic as it may be) because he tried to sue a youtuber for $500,000 for calling him that - and he lost. So the name stuck.

Up until his most recent foray into parliament, the legally certified Fuckhead was best known for his batshit business ventures, such as attempting to build "The Titanic 2" (failed) and trying to build a dinosaur theme park (also failed, but at least nobody got eaten by a T-Rex in this one).

For a very long time Clive played the role of sugar daddy to Australia's largest conservative party, the ironically named Liberal Party, until they had a falling out in 2012 after Clive claimed there was too much money influencing politics (lol), at which point he started his own party, days after saying he totally quit and wasn't fired and he only left because he didn't want to be a distraction.

His initial run at parliament was actually kinda successful, with Palmer's group winning 4 seats, plus a member from the "Motoring Enthusiasts Party" joined them too after accidentally getting elected and not knowing what the fuck to do.

Despite this initial success however, Palmer's party (which ran on basically no platform other than "I'm rich") hit an iceberg (titanic 2 achieved) and seven elected state and federal politicians quit within the first year.

By the time the next federal election rolled around, only one Palmer party candidate was still running for re-election. The most successful of this group - Jaquie Lambie - quit to sit as an independant and is still in parliament today.

Here she is with a painting of herself strangling Clive (she sells signed copies of this)

And here the senator is posting about liking sausage:

Anyway, we're getting to the point: which is the yellow posters. By the 2016 election, just two years after forming, the party was in complete freefall. It won just 0.01% of the vote at their second election, and it was announced shortly after that Clive was quitting politics and the party was being shut down. Australia breathed a sigh of relief.

It was, of course, short lived.

Clive, in desperate need of attention, restarted the party for the 2019 election, fielding candidates in every seat and spending $60 million in advertising in an attempt to win votes.

Every single candidate lost.

It was in this campaign however that Australia really started to fall out of love with Palmer, because most of that $60 million went towards putting up the world's least compelling marketing billboards on almost every single free space in the country.

For a good six months this was basically the only thing you would see in Australia if you went outside:

Clearly Graphic design is his passion. And yes, the genius did just straight up try and copy Trump's homework while changing a few words, hoping nobody would notice.

Very quickly these all got vandalised and it seemed the ad companies didn't care enough to replace them.

We could go on posting examples, there are thousands, but the best is definitely the one Ikea put up shortly after Clive lost the election:

In 2022, Clive's party contested the election AGAIN, this time also opting to send millions on spam text messages to every person in Australia begging for people to vote for him, as well as buying almost every youtube ad for a year, at the cost of $100 million.

He won a whopping one seat.

During this election Clive ran on an anti-lockdown, anti-vax platform with the slogan "freedom, freedom, freedom". That message, however, was slightly undermined when his goons, dressed in 'Freedom!' shirts, made national news for trying to beat up a protester who turned up at a rally dressed as an annoying text message, shouting "pay your workers" at Clive.

As if that wasn't bad enough, at another rally Clive knocked himself unconscious while trying to jump up on stage, and then a few weeks later was rushed to hospital with covid, while his anti-vax ads were still in regular rotation on TV, at which point it was also leaked to the press that Palmer had been alledgedly trying to buy Hitler's car.

Utterly humiliated, the party deregistered again shortly after the election.

Can't wait until he runs again in 2025.

Anyway, on the other "Clive tweeting Miss Kobayashi's Dragon" thing, we have no idea what that means but here's a screencap:

[abyssalpeach]

in the case of the people vs. bell's hells...

and also the campaign 3 finale overall. disclaimer: this is gonna get long bc of my propensity to yap so i'm gonna simultaneously try to keep it short but also put it under a "read more." spoilers will be referenced throughout.

i wouldn't call these rent-lowering gunshots, but i desperately need some of the folks in this fandom to get a grip. so instead i'm asking: walk with me. hold my hand. i am looking you in the eyes and want this fandom to be a nice place. please forgive me for any attitude but i am tired of being talked down to.

"they never faced any consequences" consequences are the result bad dice rolls. of which they had plenty. if you think their narrative choices should have resulted in more punishment, say that. but i think you missed the part where they have targets on their back from several factions and now-mortal deities and you need to kill the cop in your head.

"it was too confusing and the pacing was bad" i don't even disagree with this takeaway. i will say this was actually the easiest campaign for me to follow. m9 is so fun, but was very narratively scattered at times. however, i think this is just the nature of ttrpg/actual play. it's not scripted. it's messy and sometimes you'll zone out about it. sometimes what the players want isn't what grabs you personally. it doesn't mean they're wrong or bad to play it that way.

"i fell off c3 and everything i've heard about the finale is stupid" fall off, then. totally fine, i'm not here to stop you, sincerely. and not to hurl cliches, but with tabletop it really is more about the journey than the destination. without context, you are missing too many pieces to pass judgement. that's all i'm gonna say on that.

"the other PCs were just so much better" i gotta say this one seems like a skill issue lol. there's not a single party i haven't loved with my whole heart, but they satisfy different purposes or dynamics! vm was destined for greatness. m9 was destined to pull important strings. bh was destined to shake up the order of things. they were supposed to be controversial in-world. they're salt of the earth, rising far beyond their stations ever expected. they became important at work and it very nearly ruined their lives.

"it was like sitting in a philosophy 101 class" praytell what philosophy classes that you've sat in discussed the ethics of magic, direct divine involvement in human* lives, and potential outcomes that would come along with killing all the gods or releasing something called the god-eater. look. i grew weary with the rehashing of these conversations too, really i did. that said, i think it needed to play out this way in order for the finale to go the way it did.

allow me to explain. one of the defining qualities of bell's hells was how different they all were. whether it's their perspectives, life experiences, backgrounds, desires, aspirations... you get it. this was the point. they were bound together by compassion and love for each other. and this extended to those they stood for personally, and those their friends cared about. it was how they approached ruidus, the gods, the people of vasselheim. and they walked the walk and trusted the process, prepared to face anything. including death.

*obviously including all exandrian/ruidian races beyond just human

"the finale cheapened the ending of vox machina" it didn't. i'm sorry but it very fundamentally did not and if that's your takeaway from a change of circumstance ~30 years down the line, i am worried that you are too lost in the sauce due to favoritism. if your takeaway from vax being allowed to return to the material plane is that now his conclusion from 30 years ago was just him going on a work trip, that is a you problem.

the narrative doesn't treat it like that. the characters don't treat it like that. the cast doesn't treat it like that. let me repeat myself: if you think vax's c1 ending is now nothing more than a glorified work trip, that is a you problem.

life goes on. the state of the world is changing constantly, especially in a world with gods and magic and different planes of existence. matt allowed these players to have direct involvement in the ways it changes. if vax was allowed to return in some capacity as a result of those changes, the cast made that happen. it wasn't even on bell's hells priority list! this was a natural change of circumstance. if that's the kind of thing you find upsetting, maybe unpack that elsewhere.

i'm gonna wrap it up here but i hope you keep this in mind: if you don't like a thing anymore, you can absolutely drop it. you don't need anyone's permission. but what i ask is that if you want to engage in thoughtful conversation and criticism about it, you keep these things in mind.

i don't believe this show or cast to be above criticism. i have plenty of critiques of my own. but the campaign three finale was the opposite of bad. it was the most satisfying conclusion we could have possibly gotten. it was the culmination of the last 3 years with almost everyone who encountered bell's hells and honored the last 10 years of their hard work. i am so so proud of matt and the cast and i think you should be too.

[as-i-watch]

Vax in the background like 'we are in a foreign palace jesus get a room'

[ginalongillustrations]

Vox Machina

I'm done. Holy shit y'all I'm fucking done (barring Tary and the several NPCs I wanna do)

Made all seven of these while going through the campaign and I just finished the campaign a few days ago and I'm in that mourning phase that I don't get anymore story with these characters who I couldn't help but come to love with all their strengths and weaknesses.

The prints look so amazing side by side. I'm happy that I got to make all these while the inspiration lasted.

Now watch me go back and just watch through campaign 1 again instead of campaign 2 because I'm I am going to miss these characters too much. I know campaign 2 is super beloved and I'm sure I'll get there eventually, but for now.. I mourn.. and admire these prints on my wall.

Also, to the random person in my tiktok comments when they saw me watching ep 4 in the background of a video while painting Anakin. That I would love Vax and Percy the most because it would be similar to Anakin and I laughed it off... you were half right, because Vax is so Anakin coded in the ways I adore Anakin and it was fate I was going to love Vax and adore him and all his rights and wrongs.

[liltaireissocute]

[PERC'ILDAN]

What are they doing? Option A: they are getting ready to play TTRPG; option B: they are actively assembling an Ikea table.

I picked secret third option

[drawsmaddy]

[ID: A digital illustration of Vax'ildan from Critical Role. He is facing to the left but his head is turned and he's looking off to the right. He's smiling and his hair moves in the wind, shifting to the left. Vax has an overall purple tint to him and the background is a light blue. End description.]

Vax!

[utilitycaster]

After that final scene I was just like oh so C3 was just the Keyleth story then. We were just with the background characters to her story. It is just something to me that BH didn't even get the final scene in their own campaign. Like Godkiller was just B story to Keyleth's A story that we didn't see. Just some parts of the BH story Keyleth sends Orym on a mission, call Keyleth to heal Launda, Keyleth back up at the key to save the day, Keyleth's former lover comes and becomes a ball, gotta heal Keyleth from her poison, Keyleth has a friend at the shattered teeth etc. This is not meant as a Keyleth hate ask or anything I hope it isn't coming off as that.

I disagree, or rather, at times that did happen but I do not think it was the intent going in.

I think that Keyleth getting involved with Laudna's death was really the point where this campaign took a downturn from which it never recovered, and I will admit as someone who enjoyed Orym I remain kind of like "Liam, this was the idea that stuck in your head for 4 years?" but I think a lot of this was like...Bells Hells not really having anything they wanted or cared about enough to pursue so you did have to lean on the past characters, who were intentionally brought in. I think the reason you might feel this way is that like...again, there weren't really consequences or strong connections from Bells Hells, whereas Keyleth as a character from C1 was awash in those consequences and connections. So, for example, the mission to get the flowers actually was in my opinion a good fetch quest...but Otohan mysteriously never used that poison on the PCs despite killing four of them on separate occasions, so it felt like Keyleth was real and they were shadows in their own narrative, moving through it but largely unaffected. The Shattered Teeth was a fun peek at a new part of the world but the only real outcome was them getting the shards; they didn't like, connect with this location or think about it meaningfully, so again, Keyleth feels more real as someone with actual memories and connection to it.

As for Vax coming back: I think it's truly one of the weakest choices made in the history of actual play and I listen and watch a LOT of actual play but (and I could be wrong, and if this was an intended endgame my opinion will dip further) it feels like the option where Bells Hells leaves Predathos sealed or the one where the gods are eaten would not end in this result. I think if the Raven Queen is destroyed Vax simply dies; one could argue he rejoins a cycle of death and rebirth now but without him being consecuted I think that means he has no knowledge of who he was in his next life, as in most real-world reincarnation beliefs; and if the gods never have to flee and Predathos remains sealed then the situation continues as it always has. We happened to get that ending, but, at least I hope, it was not an inevitability.

[jjkbambi]

The RFK thing comes from his correspondence with Gurwinder Bhogal, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. Luigi apparently said he wasn’t too excited about Biden or Trump. His health freak ass was probably interested in the healthy food part of RFK’s campaign, not the anti vax part.

I have actually not seen the anti immigration thing with my own eyes, when I skimmed his Reddit and Twitter. But I have seen several people say he retweeted something of that sort? Something about out of control immigration in Europe. Which to be fair has genuine problems but you never know where the sentiment is really coming from with the average guy from Luigi’s background.

Idk if you have mentioned this on your blog before, and I apologise for dragging politics into it, but his first cousin is notorious bigot Nino Mangione. Even by Republican standards he is extreme, and had ironically advocated for the death penalty for first degree murders in his state. I have a hard time seeing how LM would be able to maintain familial relations with someone like that unless he, at the very least, was willing to overlook those policies. On that note, Nino’s Instagram had a picture of a family zoom call and Luigi is on it, as well as a cousin of theirs who married an Indian man. Considering how anti immigrant Nino is I wonder what their overall family dynamic is.

I think Luigi is an empathetic person in his daily life (I don’t think he’d be friends with so many non white people if he was a raging bigot) but on a policy level probably leaned more right than any of us obsessed girlies would be comfortable with. I’m Indian so I’m not familiar with the white man’s fetishisation of Asian women like an American would be, but I’ve seen a lot of people defending him saying that in his field he’s bound to encounter a lot of Asian women. Is it really that weird to pick Hawaii as a temporary residence for a white man?

omg could u send the zoom thingy? ive never seen it.

+ tbh as a SEA i don’t trust any white ppl who don’t have poc friends that don’t pass the paper bag check lol,,,,

[uvher]

// cooking some vax art