#critical role research

[triaelf9]

Aeor date-sploration memories XD

[nellasbookplanet]

Mentioning Tusk Love and the potential of other independent stories set in Exandria reminded me of an old discord conversation about how they could Fix the courting of the crick for publishing (seeing as it's canonically a Bad Book due to being super dry and also racist towards drow) without breaking canon:

Rename it 'The Courting of the Kryn - a Reimagining of the Classic Story, by Jester Lavorre'

Present it as an in-universe fanfic-ish rewrite. There's a foreword where 'Jester' elaborates on the inaccuracies of the original, the impact the story had on her, and the importance of Dynasty-Empire relations. There's an acknowledgement section where she thanks Caleb and Beau as 'consultants on Empire culture', as well as an unnamed/under fake name/clearly Essek as an 'expert on the Luxon, dunamancy and Dynasty culture'. All his information on spy networks is eerily accurate and has his former co-workers scrambling. (He makes her keep all the dry historical accounts, but now it's accurate (with added dick-related puns)). She mentions that she reached out to the Bright Queen who reluctantly (after 5 messages in a row) gave some pointers. In her frantic research she possibly made some breakthroughs on the nature on the Luxon that has Essek reeling (there's a 'further reading' section where she lists the academic paper he wrote building on her discoveries and an entire list of the sources her consultants used).

For extra fun and meta-ness, include footnotes where she comments on things she changed/removed from the original and why, how various scenes may have been inspired by a real life couple or events, etc. Some of the footnotes are written by her consultants. Caleb and Essek get into arguments on dunamancy theory which is actually thinly veiled flirting. There's anatomically accurate drow sex (it's unclear whether the consultant was Essek or Caleb or possibly a certain brother, who was also consulted on Dynasty military practices).

[essektheylyss]

gotta think like a wizard to catch a wizard babey

[hello-eeveev]

what’s so funny to me is that it seems like literally everything in Aeor terrifies Essek, but he has gone there several times with Caleb for research (aka wizard fun). They would have gone again if not for the Cerberus Assembly becoming too much of a presence there. Aeor is their established date spot.

He was basically doing the thing where you go to a scary movie or a haunted house with your crush so you have an excuse to hold hands lol

[arden-wings]

guys... surely he wouldn't...

[shorthaltsjester]

coming off the high of finishing the draft of the last of my exegetical/theory heavy chapters of my thesis and while i was writing i was thinking a lot about why applying real world political philosophies to exandria specifically tends to fall flat and like. even beyond the explicit treatment of things like homophobia as nonexistent and hegemony functioning wildly differently if it really actually exists in exandria as we conceptualize it in our actual world really boils down to the works that make up a lot of the roots of the leftist theory people apply to exandria. like obviously marx is a big guy, nietzsche has more influence than you’d think given his reputation as the internets (poorly interpreted) sad boy, and less people probably know the names of the critical theorists that came out of the frankfurt school but you’d know their ideas — and they all have their toes in countless leftist ideas today, whether their influence is explicit or not. what’s notable in all those theorists is something found in the argumentative and background work that they provide before the claims most people on the internet know re: the workers of the world uniting, god’s being dead, and the culture industry, whether in their previous work or just earlier in the same books that people have read the goodreads quotes of: first principles.

if you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s just a philosophy word for basic proposition that cannot be deduced from a previous claim. And for a whole lot of works in the history of moral and political philosophy (as well as other less relevant branches), one of the most common first principles you could find was the proposition that god exists. so much of the work of philosophers who inform leftist theory has required them to do the work of either coming up with a different first principle and justifying it and/or providing justification for why first principles are in themselves a flawed notion. nietzsche was so impactful in his claim that god is dead because it targets the very notion that history and the philosophy in it was finding the proposition that god exists to be unsatisfactory if unsupported. marx then was only able to ground his historical materialism because that first principle re: god was able to be dismantled. critical theorists, like adorno for example, were only able to do their work in light of accepting that god is not something worth appealing to without justification. and the reason any of this is relevant to the fantasy world of a silly internet show where voice actors roll dice is because any leftist theory whose most foundational basis is the realization and gradual societal acceptance that the claim “god is real” could not be assumed but had to be given justification will always end up being unsatisfactory when it is applied to a world where “god is real” is not only factually true but is also societally accepted and the existence of those who might philosophize about the gods is a direct product of those gods’ existence.

this isn’t to say there can’t be insight granted by applying these theories anyway (looking at my blorbos and applying philosophical theories is my favourite hobby, just ask my thesis supervisor) nor is it to say that the risks of trying to apply these theories to exandria starts and ends with its failing to be philosophically apt — but there have been many great posts circulating re: the issues with viewing certain facets of exandria through an “it’s a colonialist metaphor” lens and many similar cases so i won’t dive in here. just pointing out that as a facet of the objective truth that can exist in a fictional world, especially a world established by gods (world here being a word that includes the existence of mortals), some of the foundational propositions of the philosophical arguments at work in those theories are rendered false in the exandrian context. but this also means that, if the gods leave exandria in some sense, i will have a very fun time unpacking a nietzschean interpretation of their absence. because i predict that though the gods will be dead/gone, his meaning of god being dead will Not be fulfilled since ostensibly the majority of exandria still looks to the gods in love and in doubt as providers of guidance, and i question how much their presence actually informs the depth of that dependence. anyway. that’s my philosophical enrichment for the night.

[kagooleo]

aside from my rice here’s a doodle dump of my timeskip johto kiddos all scribbled during classes! forgot to upload this some time ago but it's a mix of silly doodles, profile studies and outfit ideations 📝

[nat1nonsense]

Do we think I am capable of writing a whole dorym + imodna one shot in one (1) week before the finale? I was gonna write it for Valentine’s Day but actually this is more important

((and also do the people wanna see a royalty/masquerade au fanfic? bc the idea has been sitting in my brain since october and i mean especially a dorym masquerade au…….. listen.)

[viiriidiian]

caleb page to ignore the empire siblings’ unknown status post-apogee solstice... anyways! everyone say big stretch to frumpkin.

i made a matching beau page here for all you lesbians out there

[ignatiusteto]

i think sacred music in the kryn dynasty would be very cyclical and repetitive in form to symbolize the idea that life is a continuous thing (at least those who are consecuted right right) and is a cycle across lifetimes and yeah

[drthrvn]

i've watched TLoVM with my bestie (season one so far) and she absolutely loves it 😭 and since we're both trying to get into DnD, we're going to our very first session this week and we've decided that if we really get into it, we'll order ourselves Vox Machina dice sets from the CR store (i'd get Vax's and she - Scanlan's) 😭😭 guys i'm so happy

[shironezuninja]

Smiling that there are Strings Quartet versions of 2 Scanlan songs. Reminds me of how I loved listening to Strings Quartet versions of 2 anime songs from Inuyasha and Ouran High School Host Club.

[essektheylyss]

Absolutely OBSESSED with the progression of cataloguing in Critical Role, like:

Campaign 1: the Slayer's Take, religious institutions containing dangerous threats that must be hidden away. utilitarian, standard fantasy fare.

Campaign 2: the Cobalt Soul, extensive global networks of knowledge collection, collation, and dissemination. commentary on the importance of knowledge keepers and its relationship to corruption.

Campaign 3: the absolute most BUCKWILD personal collections you've ever seen in your life. hoarder territory. if there's a cataloguing system it is HIGHLY specific to its creator. what is real and and what is fake. opens up to metanarrative commentary on organization of knowledge and archival that I WILL be writing a dissertation on in five years, research funding be fucking damned.

[joyfulsongbird]

realizing with horror that i’ve once again started a giant fic project that will probably take me more than a year to finish about two characters maximum four people care about

[hello-eeveev]

Rated G, 1331 words

“You didn’t like any of the performers, Essek?” “Dislike is a strong word, but they were… not my preference, no.” “What is your preference, then?” Imogen asked.

In which pestering Essek becomes stress relief for yet another adventuring party.

[shorthaltsjester]

nothing members of the cr fandom who joined with c3 love more than saying “this would never happen in previous campaigns/with previous (male) pcs” about something that did, in fact, happen in previous campaigns and/or previous (male) pcs.