#dezran thain

[neinofthem]

i’m sorry to be an uninformed essek stan, but what is lord lord from around?? i’ve seen it mentioned a few times but i do not know what it is 😩😭

don’t be sorry it’s sort of a meta thing ok so basically esseks stupid disguise name is lord dezran thain. thain is another spelling of thane, which is the anglo-saxon word for lord. so when you’re saying lord thain you’re saying lord lord. he named his super secret inconspicuous alter ego lord lord. and THEN when jester is asking him where he’s from in nicodranas he’s like ‘… places.’ and she’s like no but where and he’s like, ‘um. around? around… in nicodranas?’ so essentially essek thelyss, spymaster and uber-suave courtier can’t think of a better alias than lord lord from around. how he got as far as he did is a complete mystery.

[burningsuitfire]

So thinking about Caleb's accent and how he sounds like Essek and Caleb being bad at accents and Essek's accent undercover and trying to connect all the dots.

Look at it this way. In campaign 2, Matt's Essek voice and accent changed wildly almost every other sentence.

Caleb and Cad (and Jester) had no clue undercover Essek's accent wasn't authentic. They barely noticed he was nervous, let alone faking anything. When they met on the Assembly's boat and Mercer rolled for Dezran where they saw his nerves, they still couldn't catch he was faking a Nicodranas persona (also again pointing out "Thain" was 100% Mercer googling noble names and not meant to be a bad cover) even with Caleb's memory, Caleb and Caduceus's extremely high passive perceptions, and Jester's background as a Nicodranas native.

And then of course Caleb's roll with frumpkin revealed it all, but it took that snooping and very high stealth roll to truly realize, and later Mercer has said he didn't expect them to catch Essek, blaming it on them rolling so high on a number of checks.

In contrast, when Astrid (an established elite spy for 15 years) was disguised and undercover in the lavish chateau, she got her fake Marquesian accent noticed immediately by (very unperceptive) Fjord of all people, who's never even visited the country... and yet he had no clue about Essek's accent or persona.

[essektheylyss]

It remains so funny to me that Caleb's idea of 'settled' is definitely "stirring up revolutionary talk in the capital like a 19th century philosophy professor while his wanted criminal boyfriend shows up on his front porch once a week in the flimsiest disguise imaginable." Icon shit.

[mini-minish]

m9 pirate + essek joins earlier + speedrun any% au 🏝

disclaimer these are just sillies for fun bc i wanted more pirate times please don't think too much about plot divergences; feel free to add your own ideas in the mix!

spoilers for the mighty nein

• fjord becomes a captain earlier

• caleb escapes the prision earlier

• while on the run and covered in tears and mud, he meets beauregard in one of her many cobalt soul escapes

• a lone half-orc captain with a cursed sword but no ship or crew walks into a bar, sees two anxious looking humans in the corner: a scrawny woman with a grumpy face and a scrawnier ginger with a towel to his recently broken nose

• seems easy enough.

• girls night!!! they steal their first boat

• rule #1 of stealing methods of transportation is that you should watch out for blue tieflings stowaways trying to get as far away from a recent problem as possible

• back on land they loose beau (got got by the soul ☝️😔), caleb gets locked up in a shady storage while looking for her and there he meets nott the brave

• fjord's first response upon seeing a goblin following his navigator is to pull the sword on it

• nott's first response upon seeing some green dude shove a sword in her face is to pull her crossbow at him

• they look up and down for beau, but she finds her way back to them eventually

• still, they'll need more hands if they want to keep their totally legally owned ship afloat

• still on land, The Circus Plot happens and they acquire two more crew members 🎉

• molly loves the ocean, yasha likes the wind

• all of them like to go up to the crow's nest and bother caleb, nott more than the others; eventually he stops hiding up there so much

• yasha starts getting anxious about her unfinished business at the same time jester stars getting anxious about their clothes not being pirate-y enough

• they lose their first ship (of pristine papers as long as you don't look at them in the light) and have to travel on land until they manage to borrow a new one without asking it's owner and with promises of never returning it

• they also lose molly :(

• but they get caduceus :) who's not very keen on being in a boat for long periods of time but he'll adjust

• one thing he'll have in common with the cat

• fjord has a problem: The Voices in his head telling him to get back on the water

• jester has a conundrum: they got all of these nice, proper pirate outfits but now they have no ship

• love wins

• she did get frumpkin his very own little coat

• in the night, as the mighty nein crew wispers around two pushed together inn tables, a cloaked figure approaches upon hearing they are in need of help

• dezran, or dez, for short, for friends, an inconspicuous sun elf from, you know, around these parts, who is in dire need of work and oh would your captain be so kind to-

• insight checks fly around the pushed together inn tables

• but all of them know each of them is running from something or someone, and not all of them have a destination in mind, so really it's not like they're going to ask.

• plus nott thinks she saw a really nice boat on the dock with it's lights all out

• welcome aboard!

• cue the guy running from stealing things having to steal things

• cue a disguised drow's inventory slots full of the strongest sunscreen balm he could find this side of the continent

• maybe caduceus or jester finds out first, around when ess- dez, for friends, got a little too reckless and a little too hurt some time or other

• but the wildmother shows caduceus a lonely star when he asks, and artagan hasn't been paying attention, and anyways that's dez, that's right, their friend who has been nothing but helpful and fun, if a little skittish depending on the weather, and who always tries jester's pastries

• besides, far from him being the only person with a fake identity at the function. he's not that special.

• when fjord and beau find out, they're suspicious, but they won't make him walk the plank. there's protocol for that.

• yasha is not one to question someone running from their past

• when nott the brave finds out, she doesn't ask what he really looks like

• when caleb widogast finds out, during a siege on the ship, he grabs essek's arm and sees the drow underneath the disguise, and wants to know who are you, but circumstances are that later, they'll talk about this later.

[ariadne-mouse]

the illusion around Lord Dezran Thain vanishes. and there standing in his place is an aggressively floating male drow with short hair

[revvethasmythh]

Essek (as Dezran Thain, desperately trying to escape): I'm so sorry, I'm not feeling well. I should probably get going. Jester: Oh, do you have stomach issues? Essek: Terribly, yes

Can't believe Essek told Jester he had IBS to try and get away from her aksbgjdagakl

[eyes-of-avalir]

thinking about the parallel of caleb watching essek's illusion drop in c2e97 vs in m9 reunited part 2. like "the illusion around lord dezran thain vanishes, and there standing in his place is a gently floating male drow with short hair" "I feel like a fool" // "the illusion fades and you see the light lavender skin and white hair of essek" "come, dear"

[pocketgalaxies]

"dezran thain is actually essek thelyss. it is a disguise."

"...but he was walking."

[acepalindrome]

While the drama potential of the audience knowing Essek is a traitor before the Nein do is through the fucking roof, let’s also consider the comedy of the audience seeing Essek disguise himself as ‘Dezran Thain’ before the Fancy and the Fooled, so we’re fully aware that it’s Essek fumbling the ball so fucking bad.

[six-improbable-things]

There's some very fuzzy math going on here... Maybe I'm wrong but I don't feel like any of the info they learned when finding out that Essek is Dezran Thain gives them any reason to immediately suspect anything. Like, yeah they learned Essek was lying to them, but 99.9% of the other information lined up with things they already knew:

the prisoner exchange with Blondie and the other guy

the Beacon being given over to the Dynasty

the only really new piece of information is that Essek is getting some research. And that lines up with his interests they already know. So like, this all makes sense.

[xnervouscircus]

idk how people in the tags are keeping themselves contained to just mentioning one or two scenes they can't wait to see animated, i'm about to pass out from how many scenes are movie-montaging their way through my brain

like i just finished rewatching traveler con, and before that was dezran thain and "you were not born with venom in your veins," and before that was the fucking cUPCAKE

and soon they'll be at mollymauk's grave and oh the story that THAT'S gonna kickoff

plans to become sane on hold for yet another day

[quinn-of-aebradore]

I certainly wouldn’t complain if they went with some shadowy figure scenes! Or showing him using his Dezran Thain disguise! Actually, using Dezran would be fantastic, because you wouldn’t see him anywhere else in the story unless until the events of episode 97.

Sorry it’s on my mind again but part of the reasoning for why I don’t want M9 Animated to reveal that Essek is the Beacon thief is because it would fundamentally change the connotations surrounding him and his role in the show to viewers who haven’t watched C2 and don’t already know where his arc ends.

The way he’s introduced in C2, he’s odd and mysterious and intimidating, but there’s nothing inherently antagonistic about him. He’s never once painted as a villain for the Nein. Which allows for them to befriend him as they do, and serves to gut-punch the viewer alongside them when The Reveal happens! He was supposed to be an antagonist but he never was, because of the Nein.

But if you show him doing treason things early, before the Nein even meet him, then it changes that framing entirely! Then he is painted as a villain, especially if we see him interacting with Trent like we know he did once or twice. It turns his early interactions with the Nein from mysterious to sinister, as he’s been depicted as an ally of one of their Big Enemies and Caleb’s nemesis. All of the Nein’s efforts to befriend him get colored with the knowledge that Essek is lying to them. Which! It’s very important for me to say that that isn’t wrong, obviously he very much is. I myself went into the Xhorhas Arc of C2 knowing Essek was the traitor. But being locked into the Nein’s perspective for it changes the tone, even knowing that. But for a new viewer, going in completely blind, it makes Essek seem deceptive and villainous when really he’s deceptive and out of his depth.

This could possibly be countered by having a scene where he’s alone at his towers and we get to see him be openly anxious over how close to him the Nein are getting, the state his deal with Ludinus is in, but I don’t know how effective that would be when stacked up against other scenes of him doing Assembly things! Especially depending on how early those scenes would start; if they start very early, it makes Essek seem like a very looming figure over the narrative which he just… isn’t. He’s not looming until the Nein meet him. He’s there in the background, yes, but aside from the initial hand-off, his role with the Beacons is rather minimal. He was fed scraps by Ludinus, we know that.

However. This doesn’t mean I’m 100% opposed to an Essek flashback. You know when one would slot in very well? The start of the episode after the reveal. Imagine it, an episode ends on the conversation between Essek and Ludinus that Caleb spied on and the next one picks up a couple years in the past, showing them striking the deal and then cutting to later on, Essek handing over the Beacons. That would fit in spectacularly well.