#caleb and nott

[ablueper]

books and booze and 🥺

caleb: can we trade your expensive flask for money so that we can get books for me and booze for you

nott: but this flask is shiny. and i like it 🤩

caleb: but we could get you a lot of booze. a lot.

nott: that is tempting. but this is my only flask. 🥺

caleb: we can get you another one. and also books 🥺. books please 🥺. the books i've been talking about and hoping to get 🥺. expensive books worth 13 gold 🥺. books 🥺?

nott: counteroffer — (hands him 13 gold) 😚 i like this better

[bravenot]

a gem from caduceus’ origins comic. they’re holding on to each other’s clothes. oh this is too much.

[bombdotcomshop]

“I do not have a dice problem” I whisper to myself knowing full well it isn’t true 😂

In my defense they make great photo props! Psssst some unreleased special projects in the photos above. What are you looking forward to?

[bee623]

One day i will eventually finish critical role campaign 2… one day.

[ablueper]

#i wonder if part of the “imodna never struggled to survive” bit has to do with marquet as a setting being underdeveloped#and vaguely a utopia#in early c2 there was a lot of effort made by matt to honor sam's choice to be a goblin in the empire#guards wanted to attack nott people would refuse to sell to her she had to use disguise self to run errands#the vibe in the dynasty was a stark difference to the behavior towards nott in the empire#sorry to dredge up the “c3 had no consequences” disk horse again but laudna being undead was never an actual problem#not in societies or fancy parties#not for resurrection rituals#not during political meetings with people who banish the undead as a day job#it was always just spooky but ultimately fine#a lot of the emptiness of imodna traveling together for two years may be a symptom of the setting being flawed from the jump#there's so much to discuss with this post and maybe i'll comment on another aspect later#but the disrespect of marquet as a setting will always be such a huge problem to me and it affected so many characters (via @zealousvalkyrie)

listen, now that everything is said and done i'm going to say something i've been thinking but not outright saying for the past nearly four years. frankly, imogen and laudna's relationship is a pale shadow of caleb and veth's and if you really sit and think about it, it's outright embarrassing for the former party. it's like if you saw a beautiful piece of art and tried to emulate it and then the only thing you managed to jot down that was the same was the basic shape and you never added any color when the color was the most important part. imogen and laudna's relationship is formed out of almost the exact same origins (troubled mage who needs to keep a distance from regular society joins up with monstrous misfit with a traumatic backstory and become each other's most important person while traveling place-to-place because they keep getting into trouble in cities). the difference is, genuinely, how much more colorful and lived in caleb and veth's story feels. they met in a podunk county jail and worked together to break out of the place, stayed together for practical reasons (straight-up survival) and then out of genuine friendship. they were hobos in the woods together. they cuddled on the side of the roads on cold nights together. they were genuinely each other's sole lifeline because they were the type of people no one in the world cared about in a very real, visceral way. they were also con artists, and sam and liam worked together to come up with an entire booklet of different cons they used to survive, which come into play surprisingly often during the campaign (Modern Literature, famously, but also Mother's Love and Money Pot featured).

comparatively, we know next to nothing about what imogen and laudna's lives looked like after leaving gelvaan, and the Incident™️ that sent them running in the first place remains amorphous and random no matter how many times the story is told or whatever extra details get added. the people of gelvaan found laudna to be a generically threatening presence (because of her fun-scary appearance and/or kooky-fun-scary behavior) and picked up their torches and pitchforks to run her out of town. imogen heard her thoughts and found them so beautiful she nearly killed two of the townspeople she grew up with the defend her and then they fled into the night together. and that's it. what did they do for two entire years after that? i don't know! neither do you. they don't appear to have struggled for money like caleb and veth did, there's no reference to hard-living, no real reference to what jobs they took to stay afloat, no mention of the practical realities of living as homeless nomads, no mention of towns and cities they'd visited and how those places impacted them. nothing. empty. no color. how did their relationship develop? also don't know! they seem to have slotted together perfectly as friends with no conflict for years before slotting together perfectly as lovers while batting aside all attempts at conflict later. done and dusted, that's the relationship, and people have the gall to call caleb and veth's successor relationship 'soulmatism' when it doesn't hold a candle to what the original offered.

which was, to be clear, endless complexity. i can't tell you how to define it, and i don't think the character's themselves could define it if they tried. sam went into the campaign intending to lean into a familial relationship and quickly realized that wasn't the vibe, course-corrected into veth having a crush on caleb--something sam has said developed fairly early in the campaign.* liam went into the relationship not intending to care about her nearly as much as he ended up doing, then spent the early campaign eps grappling with just how suddenly important she was to him, to the point that, in the face of her potentially dying in episode 20, liam says to sam, "do you want to make my character turn evil already?"** both were surprised at how tightly their characters clung to each other, and developed a deeply caring, highly insular dynamic where they were suspicious of outsiders and desperately guarded each other. with full retrospect, both went into the relationship intending to use each other (caleb for general usefulness/protection and veth, obviously, hoping caleb could change her back one day), then found such deep and tender care that they became each other's worlds. for a time. until nott became veth and veth had a husband and it sent their relationship into a tailspin because no matter how you frame the relationship, caleb clearly felt his feelings for her and the way they behaved together stepped over the line of how one should act with a married woman. after that, he is terrified of the idea that he might not have a place in her life and works so hard to create opportunities to insinuate himself into her present and future (teleportation spells so she can travel home quickly and still return to the group, making room for her family in the tower so she can stay with him, offering to tutor luc in magic to stay in her life, etc). veth gets her body and her life back but fears returning home will be lackluster compared to what she's experienced with the group, starts falling out of love with her husband, and has intense extra-martial feelings for caleb that are canonical. their relationship morphs and changes constantly throughout the campaign, and the one thing about their dynamic that never changes is how deeply and truly they love each other. you want to talk about soulmatism? them being the two party members with fake names who's real names share aspects of each other ("Bren" and "Brenatto") both from small-town dwendalian empire who's lives have been deeply impacted by meddling of the cerberus assembly (veth's in adulthood, caleb's in childhood) and who's deepest traumas are respectively fire and water does the trick for me.

so why is one so popular and the other, particularly as a romantic ship, very much is not? it would be obtuse of me not to immediately point to the fact that imogen and laudna are two pretty, skinny white women who claim to have deliciously little agency in their own stories and provide a blank enough canvas that the relationship can be whatever you want it to be. there's a reason there's so many AU fics for them, after all. caleb and veth on the other hand would center first a relationship between the handsome white fandom-popular sadboi and *checks notes* a self-described ugly, unfeminine goblin with deep neuroses and later a short, fat brown woman who also happens to be a young mother from a small country town. popular fandom, tragically, will almost always turn away from dealing with complexity of the latter for the empty calories of the former regardless of the quality gap between the two. if anything, watching the popularity of imogen and laudna's relationship has cemented my opinion that if veth had been different (either a man or a generically attractive white woman or someone more conventionally pretty just in general), widobrave would have been a massively popular ship, and i think it would have been regardless of veth's marriage. people can forgive a lot to write about their two generically attractive favorites getting together. they're a lot less forgiving for an ugly goblin or a fat, brown young mother, though.

tldr: reject modernity, embrace tradition. ship widobrave

*Talks Machina for C2E88, VOD no longer available, but a paraphrase of the quote can be found here **(2:09:30 on the YouTube VOD).

[nevenne-creates]

iiii might have started another rewatch bc i needed something to watch as i worked on a project for another fandom and that backfired

[soranatus]

THE MIGHTY NEIN: Alone & Together

For @kermit-coded Happy Birthday!!!

[anrimortis]

🍂 holy melancholy

[yudol-skorbi]

teeny tiney hut to make them all safe and sound

[teaweltzer]

Mighty Nein to finish the CR campaign group shots I've done!

[lemonraven]

caleb and nott. guys, critical role is literally taking over my life. i've never made this much fanart for anything t-t

[ablueper]

nott: caleb has a magical spell that alerts you when someone tries to break in your room. best part is, it doesn't alert him when i sneak in or out 😄

caleb (under his breath): that you know of

nott: wait, what? 😧

[bravenot]

one of the most crazy-making caleb/nott quotes has gotta be “I need him. I need him to live.”

because it sort of means she needs caleb to keep himself alive. and it sort of means that she needs caleb in order to stay alive, herself, because she relies on his magic.

as nott sees it, life’s not worth living unless he ‘saves’ her and transforms her back into Veth. but she also needs him because she loves him, even this early in the campaign.

[quippso]

za dash

[verdiris]

Pain doesn't make people. The pain is inconsequential. It's love that saves them.

[monstyra]

the mighty nein! [ w/ essek cuz ppl missed him dearly last time i did pc art lmao ]