#god... the way molly and veth paralleled

[vethbrenatto]

I feel like when you’re ready to know your past, I would support that // You don’t even seem curious about yourself... we really liked you.

[thesleeplessarchives]

on caleb and relationships (tl;dr liam has too much chemistry with everyone at the table)

because i posted about m9 relationships earlier and i still have thoughts

every time i see caleb have a meaningful interaction with someone i go absolutely buck wild. 

every single caleb and nott/veth conversation ever makes me want to weep at their tenderness, at how much they CARE about each other. they love each other so much and it’s so clear. even now that they’re both close with the rest of the nein as well, even now that veth has her family back, they still care about each other more than anyone or anything else in the world. and sam and liam make every scene gold, switching from sharp and funny to gut-wrenchingly emotional. they’re in love your honor

essek and caleb... the narrative parallels.... how essek is roughly 90 episodes behind caleb’s character arc at any given time....... the way essek has been touched by all of the nein, as cares for all of them, but could not meet caleb’s eyes from the shame of his actions... the forearm touches....... matt and simply have too much chemistry

caleb and molly not that other bastard we don’t talk about him this is a lucien hate account had such an appealing bond partially because of how different they appeared to be; one was this loud, colorful, bullshitting talker who was an arrogant dick but at his core a truly kind, good person, and the other was this quiet unassuming dirty man who could actually be very charismatic when he needed to be, and was not the kind man he appeared to be, and it WORKED. molly was all bluster and arrogance and scared, and caleb put up the opposite façade, to not let others see he was dangerous, that he wasn’t nearly as meek as he seemed. god I miss molly

even caleb and astrid, who i didn’t really care too much for other than as part of caleb’s story until last episode, have such a clear connection. caleb might no longer be in love with her (and the jury’s still out on her feelings) but he clearly feels something for her, and the tension between them during the dance was nigh on tangible. the end of e110? ‘race you to the top’? what a CHARACTER. once again, matt and liam, what the fuck

[pike-the-monstah]

alright, so this is the silliest post i’ve ever made, but i think i will elaborate on the somnovem/bugsnax au, actually

(praying that tumblr doesn’t fuck up the readmore because this got long)

the au takes place in a world that’s a bizarro blend of both series, shortly after some version of the iron shepherds arc. please do not question anything about the logistics of this world, because there are no answers. molly dies, but for whatever reason, the mighty nein don’t cross paths with caduceus just yet. cree has been following the mighty nein a lot more closely in this au, so when the mighty nein visit molly’s grave on their way home, it’s already empty.

the tomb takers are on a mission to spread bugsnax to the rest of the world (instead of the somnovem)a. lucien, newly revived (god knows how that all went down), works with cree to rebuild the tomb takers and locate snaktooth island, while the mighty nein set out to track down molly. eventually, the tomb takers find their way to snaktooth, and once the mighty nein learn where the group has gone, they put together an expedition to follow. 

their recruits:

shakaste, cali, and keg are obvious choices, as previous allies. i’d throw nila in there too, but, given how her mini-arc ended, i think the m9 would probably want her to stay with her family

reani hasn’t met the group yet, but she’s been receiving visions from samliel telling her of a great danger on snaktooth island. she’s already been searching for a way to get there, and happily joins up with the mighty nein.

essek also hasn’t met the group yet, but, like floofty, essek has somehow gotten whiff of the possibilities of the place and is intrigued. he’s looking for a way to get there that isn’t outright suicidal, and joining this group seems convenient enough.

and finally, the last member is twiggy- just like in canon, they meet her when she stows away on their ship.

(also yasha sticks with the mighty nein in this au, to find out what happened)

the gang arrives on snaktooth island, and at first, things are fine. this is early campaign, though, before a lot of character growth for everyone, so cracks quickly begin to show. it all comes to a head in a big fight that leads to most of the group going their separate ways, and this is where caduceus comes in.

caduceus serves the newcomer/pseudojournalist role, and he has probably not been having the best time. like in canon, the wildmother is pretty fucking concerned about this place and seems to want him to do something about it, but, unlike in canon, he doesn’t have the mighty nein to travel with. it’s not the easiest journey for anyone alone, and, of course, it ends with his airship crash-landing in the middle of a storm. he does, however, meet fjord and jester.

fjord and jester vaguely take on filbo’s role in this au- when the group split, they stayed in town, and are doing their best to bring the village back together. in the middle of the storm, they witnessed the crash, and hurried up to flavor falls to find the airship’s (former) occupant. pretty weird way to meet someone, but, after a bit of exposition, they enlist caduceus’s help.

on their way back to snaxburg, they meet keg in the garden grove. keg is not exactly good with difficult social situations, and the one that led to the group falling apart was a clusterfuck. now that things have calmed down, though, they manage to convince her to return, although probably after some wambus-style “get revenge on that annoying bunger” quests. they also run into shakaste here, but i don’t think he ever really left town- he honestly seems too level-headed.

the five of them reach snaxburg, and the quests to reunite everyone else begin:

caleb and veth are living in the simmering springs. even though their attachment to the group solidified after molly’s death, the transformative powers of the bugsnax and the possibilities for veth(/nott) were too tempting not to investigate. they maybe went a little overboard experimenting, though, leading to arguments with the rest of the group, who grew increasingly concerned and alarmed at what the pair were doing. caleb and veth left the village to continue their studies in peace, but, since they haven’t been having much success, it’s not too difficult to convince them to return.

essek is nearby in the boiling bay for similar reasons, and he, caleb, and veth formed a loose Science Collective in their time away from the rest of the group. this is early campaign essek, though, so he’s still kinda keeping to himself, and it takes longer for him to agree to come back.

cali and twiggy are in the scorched gorge. while investigating the island, cali found evidence of a past cult of the caustic heart presence (if triffany’s grandma and grumpbeard can both have inexplicably died on snaktooth, then so can a member of the cult of the caustic heart lmao), and left the village to investigate. i genuinely think twiggy and cali would be very fast friends, and with everyone going their separate ways, twiggy found someone to stay with rather than stick around for all the fighting. once a caustic heart artifact is located and destroyed, both are willing to come home.

reani is living out in the sizzling sands. the thing about reani is that, due to her dreams, she’s probably the first to suspect the real nature of the island, but, due to the canonical mind-warping powers of bugsnax, reani has a very difficult time convincing anyone else. this is early in her character arc, too, when she has a very strict view on morality, and as much as she liked everyone else initially, the others refusing to stop their bugsnax experimentation/consumption/etc would probably cause some friction. it takes the gang working through some shit for her to return later on.

beau is up in sugarpine woods. pre-kamordah, she’s still struggling with the “leave them before they leave you” mentality, and when the group fell apart, she went yeah, fuck it, guess that’s all i get, and bolted. now that everyone’s coming back together, though, they’re able to convince her to return.

and then, finally, yasha is the eggabell equivalent in frosted peak. as the group started to fracture, she felt they were all losing sight of the real goal of the trip, and did her early campaign yasha thing and just left. like eggabell, she’s been pushing herself hard to find molly, and she refuses to return to snaxburg until he’s rescued.

so the gang is all reunited, character growth takes place, interpersonal conflicts are resolved, and they even make progress on finding molly. great! too bad the volcano’s about to blow. yasha figures out how to get the door open, and the group splits up to defend the town and investigate the undersnax.

and in the undersnax, they discover lucien. turns out that when the tomb takers made it to the island, all of them were consumed except lucien, who managed to take control like lizbert. in a way, this was his plan- take control over the island to bring its powers to the mainland- but he’s struggling. the bugsnax do have mind-warping abilities and are fighting back, so it’s taking him longer than expected to achieve anything (which, despite the natural disasters, is sort of keeping the gang safe, since the island is focused on another threat). the appearance of his old friends destabilizes him even more, and shit starts to really go sideways. part of his mind starts to say, hey, if he lets the island win just a little bit and consume this group, then he can send them back to the mainland as patient zero(s), right? surely, now that he’s in power, they won’t just crumble to dust like the rest of the tomb takers, and he can remain behind to rule the island as a god. all he needs to do is let the island have what it wants, which, right now, is to go full aggro on the mighty nein.

so the bugsnax attack, beginning the “escape from snaktooth” sequence. the gang probably fights some giant monstrosities similar to not-cree, and there’s plenty of opportunity for parallels to gaining eye tattoos during battle. and for sentiment’s sake, right at the end when their airship is about to be knocked out of the sky, a little bit of molly returns just for a moment, and he fulfills lizbert and eggabell’s role as last-minute savior for the rest of the gang.

they all escape but, given who they are, i imagine it’s just to regroup before returning to solve the problem once and for all (and probably to see if that little bit of molly can be rescued in the process).

misc details: au is pretty ship-neutral but, yknow, maybe beau was following yasha up into the mountains, just a little bit. it’s probably also more ensemble-focused than the game, as opposed to the video game logic of caduceus just running around doing everything for everyone else. also, heavily considered a mighty-nein-never-met version of the au where journalist!beau investigates the island as an expositor, but ultimately, this version felt like it had stronger reasons for everyone to be there in the first place.

[c-is-for-circinate]

There are three things I love about Nott’s Veth backstory, now that I’m finally here, and thing one is just that it’s good fucking backstory.  Good job Sam!  All of the emotions!  Well done on that!

Thing two is that Nott finally makes perfect sense, after 49 episodes on the edge of my seat for it.  Nott has always been the most confusing character of the group for me, to the point where, when I wrote the whole ten-episodes-in character breakdown post (here, for the curious), I couldn’t even really put a finger on what questions to ask.  She’s frightened and brave and motherly and childlike and naive and scared and ready to murder at the drop of a hat and I have known for dozens and dozens of episodes that Nott the Brave was a puzzle with all the center pieces missing.  I’ve known for some time that the center piece was named Veth, because nobody is immune to spoilers, but I barely even knew the what of Veth, let alone the why or the how.  And even with the vague spoilery notion that Nott hadn’t always been a goblin, there was something missing, something I hoped I’d finally get once I heard the backstory from Sam himself, some central pivot that was more nuance than fact and suddenly make everything hang together.

Unexpectedly?  It’s the fact that Veth was always a weirdo with a thing for collecting strange stuff and poor people skills.  As an ordinary halfling housewife who befell a terrible tragedy, Nott doesn’t make sense, not really, not in the subtleties and the angles, no matter how much PTSD you add on from drowning and months of captivity.  But as a woman who was always on the outskirts, already a mess of self-doubt and self-preservation, who was maybe already a little weird and impulsive and ready to play fun detective agency games that a woman of her age might not normally play--yes.  There we go.  That’s the center piece.  Nott’s lost herself more than a little bit in the past year and a half, is finding and building a new self with the M9, but she finally makes sense in the context of knowing who the self was that she lost.

Which brings us to the third thing that I love so much about Nott’s backstory, and it’s the way she fits in, now, to the thematic fabric of past and present and memory and identity that the whole group has been developing for fifty straight episodes so far.  I know a lot’s been made out of Caleb and Molly, the man who loathes his past and can’t get away from it but would give anything to change it vs the man who has no past, escaped it as completely as anyone ever could but still fears it, etc etc and I’m down for those character foils any day, sure.  I want to throw in Beau, pretending she never wanted her past and it doesn’t matter anyway so it doesn’t hurt to have lost it, and Jester and her homesickness and pretending her childhood was an endless string of joys so she doesn’t have to admit that it hurt at all; Yasha and her grief and sorrow; Fjord and the mysteries he just spent two months at sea trying to solve and still doesn’t have answers for because he isn’t even really sure what questions to ask.  Out of this entire intrepid group of adventurers, Nott is the only one who still has a home left to go to that she wants to go back to someday.  

One of my Really Important Moments for Nott, one of the puzzle pieces I’ve been puzzling over for ages, has always been her reaction to Molly’s backstory reveal lo those hundred-odd hours ago.  The group is doubtful or considering or ready to applaud second chances or concerned about Lucien’s old business coming after them, and Nott sits there and declares unilaterally that a person’s past matters, and makes them who they are, and that someday Molly will want to know about his and she’ll be there to support him in it.  It’s the kind of statement that’s got the strength of personal ‘I believe this for Reasons and possibly some of them relate more to me than to anyone else’ behind it, and with everything we knew about Nott, everything we’ve learned about her straight up until Felderwind, it never ever fit.  Nott the Goblin who hates goblins, who fled her tribe--there’s no reason for her to be so obsessed with pasts.  She isn’t even bound and bogged down with enough of the right kind of self-hate to mesh with that sort of worldview, not if her past, her so-important life-defining past, is just the goblin clans and caverns.

But it’s not.  Her past is Veth, and that has to be important, because it means that this life (this body, this constant fear) isn’t everything she’s ever been or will be.  Nott-Veth’s past is so important and so very far away that she can’t even look at it in the face, so big and so far that it doesn’t come out for forty-eight fucking episodes.  I wish to god Molly had been here for this, but just, the explosion of Nott and Caleb feelings and parallels and everythings.

Because Nott and Caleb.  Because Nott tells Caleb to go fuck himself for the first time ever, and means it for just that one brief moment, just before she runs up the street to see her other son for the first time in over a year.  Because their backstories are so tightly entwined now, the bits they’ve forged together themselves while the bits they thought they’d left behind (run from, had stripped from them so forcibly) found each other and tied themselves in knots too.  Because Caleb’s deepest wish is to go back to what was, to a little house in a little town with a mother and a father and a son just like nothing was ever different, and in that respect he and Nott are exactly the same except for all the things that’ve happened in the interim that leave them so utterly different.

Thirty or forty episodes, when I was thinking about what I wanted for each of these characters someday, when I still thought Nott was Caleb’s funny goblin sidekick who needed some agency of her own, I wanted to see the day they disagreed about something important.  I was definitely right that I needed to see it, I was just so wrong about how.

[trenchcoatofthelord]

i was thinking about this for a bit while brushing out my cat's fur and there was something that i couldn't quite agree with. I don't think Lucien is a response to the question because Molly's legacy is that answer. You're 100% right that Lucien parallels Molly's belief that he leaves every place better than how he found it. And you're also right that Molly does share Lucien's arrogance in that they both think they know what's best for the people around them. I think what I disagreed with was that Lucien and Molly have different ideas of what is best for the people around them. Lucien believes that he himself is what people need, whereas Molly seemed to value individualism and, most importantly, fun. Lucien speaks of himself as an oncoming god/savior with sincerity, forcing more eyes on Beau and Caleb, whereas Molly's quote about being a god was made in jest as a way to gift his friends his leftover fruit.

Additionally, I think it's kinda unfair to bring up charming Veth in Zemnian Nights because the party was still going through the growing pains of coming to trust one another. Nott tried to steal Fjord's letter twice and the interrogation revolved around that topic.

It's always interesting to me how often Molly's "I left every town better than I found it" is invoked out in the fandom without reference to the context of its original conversation...

Molly: I always try to be helpful when I turn cards for people. Beau: You ever think you could actually be doing damage, though? Setting people on false paths? Molly: People are looking for a path, they're looking for a path. And I'll tell you—and this is true—I did my best every town I went to and every town I left, no matter how they treated me, and a lot of them treated me with deep disrespect. Beau: Some people are vulnerable and looking for answers. Molly: I left every town better than I found it. —2.14: Fleeting Memories

...especially since that conversation feels so reminiscent of what Lucien is saying now...

Lucien: And when the greatest imaginations become one and only know suffering over a thousand years. Well, that builds into an extraordinary being without focus. Unstoppable force driven by instinct. It's dangerous, all right. But those with imagination, the things I can imagine for them. Caduceus: Is that what you think you're bringing to it? Focus? —2.122: Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

Lucien: But they're close now, too, the wee babes, lost without their king. Endless hunger, limitless potential, without focus, divided among thousands of mewling fragmented minds. The Nonagon saw this in them. And I'll be reborn greater. I am their savior, as they were mine. I will save them from their pain, from their wasteful existence. —2.134: The Streets of the Forgotten

Lucien: The instinct of their dreams driving them, in a place where they could will their dreams to be—were their will not so fragmented. They needed help. It was hard to push through the hunger, for now the city was alive and things that live need to eat. I was lucky to be a mind free, one to speak to it. There's so much that they could do, but they just lack the guidance. It's a waste of potential. But I think I can show them. —2.136

Caleb: You plan to go and stay there? Or, bring something back and make this world better than how you found it? Lucien: Yes. —2.136

Molly sincerely had benevolent intentions, and he clearly wanted to do good and help. But, he was also incredibly paternalistic: he was convinced he knew what was best for people, better than they themselves knew. He was not above manipulating them to forcibly lead them to that path—see, for one example: Charm Person on Veth in 2.11: Zemnian Nights and on Fjord in 2.23: Have Bird, Will Travel. His statement that he left every town better than he found it is deeply undercut by a great many things (most of which is not the focus of this post), but most especially undercut by how much he constantly ignored people's agency and refused to consider what people themselves voiced what they felt was best for themselves. How much did Molly's smug superiority and manipulative benevolence actually help people? He never got the chance to step back and consider how much his paternalism and arrogant superiority (among other flaws) may be actually hurting those he is convinced he's helping.

Lucien, in his sweeping speeches these past couple episodes, paints himself in the exact same way. He even echoes a version of Molly's "no matter how they treated me, and a lot of them treated me with deep disrespect" with the Nein: "We defended ourselves when assailed, and even then, I invited you to come see what we've been working on, letting bygones be where they are" (2.136). Just like Molly, he is deeply convinced he knows better: than the Nein, than the Somnovem, than everyone. That he knows how to save all these wretched, wayward souls who are looking for a path and what that path best is for them all, regardless of what anyone has said, regardless what anyone wants.

I will save them, said Lucien—but we know his salvation will only result in unrestrained destruction upon Exandria.

I left every town better, said Molly—but the question posed to him was: how do you know what better is for these people without asking, without listening? Are you sure you're not causing damage and harm? Molly never answers that.

And, really, I wonder if Lucien has given an indirect answer.