#anyway desire to rewatch c2 intensifies but also with what time

[utilitycaster]

God you're SO correct for your tags on the reblog of your Fjord post. Like...I am huge fan of Liam's (and Taliesin's) characters and I know I can be obnoxious about them at times but I just...I just do not get people who always have to paint their faves in the bestest most hypercompetent light. Do I enjoy hypercompetent characters? Yes! But not if they're hypercompetent all the time! There needs to be a balance to these things and D&D especially, where the possibility of failure is baked into the bones of the game structure and failing forward is mechanically very important is just not the right medium of choice for any who want to avoid it. Be open to failure, embrace failure, and learn to enjoy characters being pathetic at times. How could the taste of victory and cool successes ever be so sweet if we don't see them trip face first into a puddle of mud after smacking their head against a low hanging branch before??

Thank you! I truly cannot remember if I made this in a post or if I just talked about it offline so I apologize if I repeat myself, but like, for Liam especially? Yes, there is that deep sense of tragedy throughout, but the reason it hits is because Vax, Caleb, and Orym, are, on some level, also silly little guys. Liam himself gets it - in one of the Watch Parties for TLOVM he mentioned that the reason why Grog and Scanlan's arcs in season 2 are so good is that you're used to seeing those characters as mostly comedic, so it means something when the bottom drops out! The reason why Caleb's backstory reveal works as well as it does isn't just the story; it's that we've already seen that he can be quite loving and very sarcastically funny ("you look like a nerd" and "how much you drink is on you" are both stellar early Caleb lines), and all that falls away. If Caleb had truly been constantly sad and morose, instead of experiencing a wide range of joys and tragedies and successes and failures, he wouldn't be such a good character.

Like...the problem with the Mary Sue archetype isn't that it's a competent women. I love competent women. I hope I am one, at least some of the time. It's that the character is thin and flat as paper because there's no range, it's just one note perfection and success. And you're completely right - D&D is a medium where failure is part of it, so the character is also pulled out of the medium and just...lays there.