#fall of avalir

[jiru-chan]

Finally it’s finished!

The Tree of Names/Fall of Avalir!

Big thanks to @eldritchblep for letting me use her art as inspiration & the entire cast of EXU for such an amazing story 💜💜

Pattern and cross-stitch by me~

Size: approx 11x16.5” on 18 count Aida

Stitch count: 58,500

Only thing I’m sad about is that the shiny portions don’t show up with in the photo.

[tomepact]

What is Volucia's relationship with the press like Does she try to stay away from the spotlight? Does she keep up with the latest gossip?

she loves gossip. she lives for it. she absolutely eats it the fuck up. she's often in the spotlight, because while loras deals with foreign affairs, she's very involved in the inner workings of the city personalities. she's the touch point for the octothurge to the septarion, she's the voice of the oracular order, she's very much In The Mix when it comes to people in the city.

she can't help but be in the spotlight with her particular position of being a non-divine magic oracle, and she plays that to her advantage. people underestimate her because she can sometimes come off as quite clumsy and airheaded, but she's always always paying attention. you'd make a terrible mistake for thinking her smile hides the kind of bite she has underneath. she didn't get to the position of apprentice of eldamir alongside loras without some good social skills herself.

[potatoesandsunshine]

at this point calamity is like my special treat. like yes. what's the point of loving something if you don't love it enough to destroy the world. i get it. i see. what if you spent every day of your life building and maintaining and improving the thing that would ultimately ruin everything. isn't that like love too. and there are no brakes on it

[wardensantoineandevka]

Evontra'vir, referencing the fall of Avalir and the broken Pact of Crown and Throne: I was one of the stewards of Toramunda, those who trusted empty promises.

top table, formerly the Ring of Brass:

[stickandthorn]

My dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “The Fall of Avalir” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

Me: yeah whatever. I don’t feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude I swear I just saw Vespin Chloras in the mirror

My buddy Zerxus pacing: asmodeus is definitely not lying to us

[utilitycaster]

ok so to be clear: Avalir (flying city) blows up, destroying an entire continent, signifying the advent of the Calamity. A century in, Aeor is crashed into the arctic circle. Zemniaz is still, decently after the fall of Aeor, like "we are doing great here actually in our flying city" as we learned from Halas, and crashed in central Wildemount some time later. We haven't heard about Lathras other than the EXU Calamity mention; quite possibly Aeor still went ahead with blowing it up for no reason other than they felt like it. Part of Kethesk crashed into the Dreemoth Ravine shortly post-calamities, and its survivors, presumably aware of the four other flying cities destroyed during the Calamity were like "we can rebuild it" and spent actual centuries doing so only for it to then get crashed in to the SAME EXACT RAVINE by a DRAGON. what the FUCK were you guys thinking.

[occidentalavian]

Fun fact, we now have an approximate timeline of The Calamity, all thanks to the fall of Aeor.

Throughout Campaigns 2 and 3, Aeor’s ruins are consistently called “a millennium old”. Given the campaigns are set in 836 and 843 PD respectively, we can estimate Aeor’s fall taking place around 160 Pre-Divergence.

Additionally, promotional material for Downfall states that it takes place around 100 years after the fall of Avalir, the beginning of The Calamity.

From both of these dates, we can estimate that The Calamity lasted for around 260 years!

[aspiringsophrosyne]

What’s this season’s theme? They weren’t subtle about it. When the group asks her about Dohla, Allura almost literally turns to the camera and says: “Let’s just say being in dangerous situations with someone you’re close to can lead to friction.”

The show’s CRew drew considerable attention to this idea through Kima and Allura’s old friend, flashbacks to their adventuring days, Zerxus’ telling of the fall of Avalir, Scanlan’s failure to be fully present for either his daughter or Vox Machina, and the group splintering. On paper, this idea is fine, but in practice, its implementation is flawed.

Because what comes of all this setup? Scanlan steps away for Kaylie; what are the repercussions of that? While Keyleth and the twins break off from the rest, are they gone long? Does this season have a capstone with a potency similar to Bard’s Lament?

(For the record, I am neutral on having Bard’s Lament in Season 3, but excluding that eliminates one hefty bit of dramatic payoff. )

What’s interesting in hindsight is the unintentional, surprisingly substantial, and consistent theme that emerges. One that isn’t the Breaking of the Fellowship.

The twins exact their revenge on Thordak. Keyleth gets revenge on Raishan after Raishan gets hers on first the Ashari, then Thordak when he doesn’t provide her with her cure. Last season, Kaylie sought revenge but rejected it in the end, and now the Shorthalts are uncertain of where they stand. Percy wants to abandon vengeance, but Ripley forces his hand. After her fatal confrontation with Percy, the twins avenge him.

Noticing a pattern?

The script tells us this season’s heart is internal strife, but the action repeatedly shows us a revenge tale. With a strong through-line, marked thematic consistency, and multiple clear payoffs. Ironically, these elements develop organically, akin to mushrooms in the dark, shielded from the narrative heavy-handedness the spotlight would impose upon them.

With only a few tweaks, they could’ve had this plot laced up tighter than a 19th-century corset. Let the twins learn the identity of their mother’s murderer earlier, and let them get the last strikes on him. Give us the group HDYWTDT on Ripley. Let the anger Keyleth feels at Raishan initially block her from passing her earth trial—setting her up as a parallel to Percy; they both let go and walk out of this season alive—and you’ve cooked a full-course meal.

Instead of a retread, frame this story as an extension and escalation of the Briarwood arc—which established how self-destructive the old eye-for-an-eye can be—but this time for the villains: Thordak must be thwarted, and Ripley’s and Raishan’s respective revenge quests draw Vox Machina’s ire and ensure their downfall.

Because sometimes, one person’s vengeance is another person’s karma.

And if desired, you could build upon this idea even further in future seasons when the enemies waiting in the wings move to center stage. Some of them might be interested in payback.

The fact this secondary focus emerges so well and so naturally proves that this show's material is good enough that it doesn’t need bells and whistles or excessive exposition to establish and justify itself. Less-to-no spoon-feeding, keeping and bolstering what was great about the source material, and leaning into this revenge theme would’ve given us not just a much sounder narrative thread this season but a subtler and uncontrived one. And it wouldn’t have needed any extra time. It might’ve needed less if Ripley wasn't around as long.

This season didn't need an underdeveloped central theme that couldn't hold together for lack of payoff shoe-horned into it. It's a worse version of a problem season 2 had, where the idea of VM learning to not run from their problems made little sense in context and didn't really go anywhere for anyone except Scanlan.

All in all, it might be better to prioritize capturing what was great about the source material before adding to the story. Otherwise, you run the risk of throwing something in the stew that clashes with its other ingredients, and there'll be significant potential and several opportunities that could end up going to waste.

[ludinusdaleth]

i do not remotely mean this as in insult to the bells, but to me, even before c3 began, i knew it was never going to be a story that would survive on or deserved to be about one party. critical role would have gone stale if it went on much longer as it was, with just its og cast, and you could feel it brimming with understanding of massive events - changes of reality & its own fictional world - on the horizon. i know the concept of a "crossover" story with a staggering number of central characters is inherently risky, but i genuinely think one of c3's biggest strengths is just that.

avalir needed to be presented during c3's runtime, a precursor to past calamity as exandria entered a new one; aeors story needed to be told in this campaign, the apex of mortality's fall in the past as the war for ruidis began to fever pitch in the now; the bells hells needed "guest" stars that truly became their own party members, more than just the og white cast, so many people surviving as nobodies in apocalypse beyond those you expected to take up the call; the crown keepers needed to parralel the bells (hell, they are the bells), infinite parties thrown to slaughter by war when all they wanted was friendship, with hope still deep within them to return to each other; the mighty nein & vox machina & their cohorts needed to push & bear witness to the bells, analyze their own dynamics with power and what it means to be a hero/leader in a time where that isnt clear cut and comes at severe cost not measured in these ways in their campaigns; and most importantly the bells needed - and as of recently chose - to be thrust into being heralds of history. their story was built on heartbreak of being crushed under the boot of other's hero journeys (the story emphasizing that while they got caught in fate, they arent alone in that fate of being "unimportant"), and so it is in the campaigns lifeblood to provide them the chance to look at the tapestry in a way no other can, to bear the tragedy of being the sacrificial lamb and deciding what sacrifices of the world & themselves to make in turn, especially in a campaign that is blatantly asking the question of what is worth it to be in an imperialisically-designed fantasy universe where thousands are not seen as important to the pov of the hero.

[soath]

Calamity very rapidly became “this city is doomed, now what can you save” but that was the story of a city we knew nothing about. If the Ring of Brass dissolved completely then Avalir would die unremembered; because they prioritized evacuees entire swathes of citizens and a treasure trove of knowledge escaped. Downfall does not have the luxury of such victories! Unlike Avalir, which we didn’t know the final details of, we know exactly how Aeor is going to fall. The city itself shattered midair, hundred of thousands dead in the streets, a select few sheltered in little pockets of frozen time. Aeor explicitly had no survivors, by necessity no one carried on its legacy, no one even remembered where it fell. We aren’t going to get a great triumph of the human spirit, civilians are going to die en masse here and the Calamity is going to get so much worse before it gets better.

Yet being limited to the tiniest margins of victory has the potential to tell a story fascinating in its own right. If even one Aeorian can be saved, is that a victory? Is it kindness to single out one person, or five, or ten, to live while everyone else dies? If they let one set of plans for the Factorum Malleus escape that’s an abject failure. So what will they sacrifice, who will they hurt, to accomplish that goal? Does it even matter how many bystanders they silence onscreen? Aeor’s people are going to die screaming in twelve hours anyway. Pelor calls them all children, what does it mean for the gods to smother their own children to save themselves?

[edelgarfield]

I am genuinely so sick of seeing the take that "man's hubris caused the calamity" and that being used as "take that!" against the people of Aeor, who largely were not even alive during the start of the Calamity, & who, regardless of the reason, have had to live in a world ravaged by the gods' conflict.

Avalir and Aeor were far from perfect & the ruling class certainly was full of hubris & elitism, but blaming mortals as a whole for the Calamity is so incredibly fucked up. Avalir as a whole did not collectively decide to invite the Betrayer Gods into the Material Plane. The largest instigators of the Calamity were:

1. Vespin Chloras, who was following in the footsteps laid by the Raven Queen, and

2. Zerxus, who was manipulated by Asmodeus, and

3. Asmodeus, who despises mortals because he blames them for the rift driven between the Prime Deities & Betrayer Gods.

Like I can't speak to Vespin Chloras but I genuinely cannot find it in myself to blame Zerxus, a mortal man, for being manipulated by the God of Manipulation, or for believing in redemption and forgiveness. You can think he was foolish to fall for it, but being gullible or having faith isn't a sin. There's a bunch of arguments that "it's arrogant for a mortal to believe himself deserving of forgiving a god" and I won't argue that Zerxus had some arrogance & self-righteousness. But I just. I do not and will never believe that divine beings are morally superior to mortals.

there's this idea that the pursuit of godhood/power is inherently corrupt, and to an extent I'm inclined to agree (I started a whole rant here abt this, but that's a different post). but hand in hand, there seems to be this idea that the gods themselves are shielded from that same corruption, which I simply don't think is true. whether mortals are capable of wielding the power of a god without being destroyed is a separate issue to its morality. something being inherently risky/unsafe does not automatically mean it's wrong. but I don't understand how people can say it's irresponsible/evil for mortals to pursue godlike power, or that they can't be trusted to wield that power, without applying the same logic to the gods themselves. It doesn't make sense to me that the pursuit of power is wrong, but the ones who actually wield that power, sometimes violently & unfairly, only ever wield it responsibly.

in fact, I think that without any sort of power to resist the violence & will of the gods, the gods are left completely unchecked to use Exandria in whatever capacity they choose to. that's an extremely dangerous thing for anyone living on it, and asking mortals to simply trust that the gods will never act against the people of Exandria is an extremely cruel thing. If people choose to have faith in the gods & their will, that's wonderful. But faith being a requirement just to live peacefully, & deeming anyone without faith sinful & arrogant is unfair.

it's not morally bankrupt to desire freedom from the will of the gods. it's not corrupt to want mortals to carve their own path. it's not evil to question what you've been told about the world.

The idea that "man's/Avalir's hubris caused the Calamity" feels like a fantasy version of "humanity is causing climate change" or "humans are inherently evil," which are extremely unpopular opinions on Tumblr. It's attributing actions taken by one or a small group of people to humanity as a whole. It's blaming humanity for being manipulated by a higher power. It's holding mortals responsible for their own murders.

[jiru-chan]

Been working on this cross stitch for about a year now and I’m about 80% complete~ I’m super proud of it~

[beedreamscape]

It's crazy to think that, even if the ring of brass had survived the destruction of Avalir and lived through the sundering of Domunas, even then only Patia and Laerryn would've lived long enough to see Aeor fall

[initiala]

Rewatching EXU Calamity because I love getting my own feelings hurt and just—UGHHHHH

Brennan getting to go feral and unhinged in this masterfully crafted world and also just canonically make Aeor Russia for no reason

All of the regular CR cast members getting exposed to Peak Brennan DMing™️

Marisha having what feels like an entire book to pull from of how disgustingly rich and lavishly put together everything in the city of Avalir is just to really top off the sundae of “we’re about to watch the fall of the Roman Empire in an instant instead of gradually”

Sam and Aabria: best divorced couple ever??

Sam and Brennan: two Extreme theater kids sat next to each other and no one thought to stop them

Travis “I think I’m in the wrong class” “I hate horror” Willingham

Lou just trying to make new friends but his buddy is just being weird and talking about a banished god ripping someone’s face off and it’s just not helping them fit in!!!

“Are you weakest at the elbow or the shoulder?”

[sicklyseraphnsuch]

For the Love of All Things

Zerxus Illerez

He spoke the following truths:

His husband and son forgot about him entirely (is that a direct contradiction to Evandrin's final words of worshipping Zerxus's heart?)

He blames his friends for the fall of Avalir (Bitch. Biiiiiiiiiiiiitch.)

That he believes now that Asmo is beyond redemption

Because at the end of Calamity, he willingly fell into Asmo's bargain despite asking to be killed before the contract could take hold (wasnt that a thing that could happen? and he did so because he stubbornly decided not to give up on Asmo??)

[wardensantoineandevka]

💙 and 🧡

unpopular opinion ask game

💙: Which character is not as hot as everyone else seems to think?

Imogen CriticalRole. She has this specific vibe that, to me—and I'm so sorry because I VERY much wish this wasn't true for me—feels like the Stanley Cup-toting, Coachella-regular white girl energy that I do not find attractive. When I try to see Imogen as hot, it feels like trying to be attracted to T-Swift. Yes, this still applies to Imogen's original outfit, which always felt less genuine ranch girl / Western and more like Instagram ranchcore.

If you're into that, that's fine and great and god be with you, but it is extremely not for me. She's like FINE, she's conventionally attractive but like in a way that just kinda is unremarkable to me, so I can't say that she's HOT, definitely not as hot as everyone seems to think.

🧡: What is a popular (serious) theory you disagree with?

I have no idea what serious theories are popular these days. I spent a long-ass time thinking about theories I thought are dumb as hell, and basically everything I thought of are, like, exactly one person pitched, thus not popular enough to be worth picking at here.

I'm gonna draw on an old one and say that I remain ehhhhh about the idea that Maya Agrupnin founded the Cobalt Soul because of having received Patia's orb. It just doesn't really gel well with the established lore about the Cobalt Soul: founded just after the Calamity (centuries after the fall of Avalir) and by followers of Ioun. I will continue to disagree even if it's canonized, that's how hard I don't vibe with it.