#i need to relisten to TAZ balance again

[robinsunrest]

There’s something about how long it takes Justin to figure out Taako as a character and in that same way it takes Taako so long to figure out who he is because both of them are missing half his heart. Both of them were missing the most vital piece of Taako.

[natjennie]

the thing they dont tell you about listening to the adventure zone for the first time is that you'll miss them for the rest of your life. taako magnus and merle will be held in your heart wherever you go. when you binge it and get caught up to the eleventh hour in 2016 and you're a sophomore in high school shoving your sweatshirt sleeve in your mouth to stop yourself from laughing you have no idea that you'll be coming up on christmas 2022 and it's been six years and a goblin that looks like common and sounds like kelsey grammer will still make you laugh. you hear "are you naming your god damn wizard taako?" and that's it for you. you're in for life.

[xoshepard]

my tenuous relationship with dm-ing where i love dnd and i love my friends but i am overflowing with anxiety and i hate prep work but the payoff is so good

im dm-ing on saturday and then we will probs have to do one more session and then after that nicki will gm urban shadows (and i get to be the wizard this time bc lucy picked oracle) but maybe after that if no one else volunteers and some ideas come to me we can do more dnd and i can dm an original campaign..............

[trx34ksh]

Maybe relistening to TAZ Balance will make me normal again. I think I just need to hear Justin McElroy go “mmmmm Splenda!” In the candle nights episode and my brain will reset.

[hellspawnmotel]

the taako show, starring taako

[luobingmeis]

im thinking abt taz balance and i need to go lie in the dirt for a little while

[stopidontgohere]

also i swear this still isn’t a homestuck blog it’s just been an important day in the series also i just happen to like this url

[six-of-ravens]

anyway not to Nightblog(TM) but I feel like I've gotten stuck in this weird rut where I dropped a whole bunch of the hobbies and media I like and Only do the same things over and over??

like, I listen to the same podcasts on the same days every week when they come out. however, I just randomly dropped a bunch of the shows I enjoy, and instead of catching up on them I just re-listen to TAZ or MFM. and I pretty much only watch the same 2 youtubers every week despite having a whole bunch I follow whose videos I get excited for. I haven't written anything in months, haven't knitted in...over a year? until last week I'd turned reading into a desperate, guilt-trippy race...

anyway TL;DR: I've made my life very routine and boring in ways it doesn't have to be, and I think in April I'm gonna try and fix that, or at least introduce/reintroduce enough things into my routine that I no longer feel like there's nothing to do after work except housework and napping and trotting through the same 2 video games over and over.

[space-gh0sts]

Wait GRIFFIN wqs the one to come up with how to pronounce "MBMBaM"?? That's actually surprising to me. For sure thought it was Justin or someone on twitter. Lol

[the-darkgod]

the only thing stopping me from relistening to the entire balance arc is solely the fact that i am kind of into the amnesty characters right now but i miss them.... i miss them so much,...

[nonsenseandstuff]

Relistening to Taz: Balance again, as I often do. And having feelings about Barry, again, as I often do.

Do you think Barry ever died in Wonderland?

Probably not, right? Because if Barry died in Wonderland, then there would be a litch v litch showdown and things would probably have been very different when Tres Horny Bois came along.

On the other hand, Wonderland is a ppace of want, of need, of yearning. And no one yearns more than Barry. When he's alive he doesn't know who he's yearning for, except the little info the coin gives him, but he yearns.

What would he sacrifice? What would he give up? For Lup, everything.

[moss-sprouted]

i miss the adventure zone, does anyone have recommendations for stuff thats similar in tone and energy as balance or even amnesty was? im slowly getting through campaign 2 of critical role(havent watched campaign 1) so it scratches the itch of craving dnd content but i Really miss the energy of taz balance, and the other stuff that isnt Graduation

i know many people say graduation is good, and i got up to like episode 10 and just Travis's dming in this campaign just isnt for me, i loved dust and the other times he's dmed but now ive seen some not so great things he's done in the campaign and outside of it thats really pushed me from wanting to listen until its completely finished and theres something new to fall back on if i dont like it

im not picky about podcasts that are visual like critical role, but id prefer an audio centered podcasts,preferably one thats is in the apple app store but either way, i just need something to focus on when im doing chores and ive already relistened to TAZ balance like 4 times already, i need to relisten to amnesty again i just miss the like fantasy comedy flair and critical role is great and i love it and will continue it, but it leans a lot into visuals for me which is great but i need, another audio dnd podcast

anyway tdlr- if anyone has any recommendations for dnd/tabletop rpg preferably audio centric podcasts that are similar in tone to The Adventure Zone: Balance/Amnesty(mostly balance though) pls shove them my way

[cntrspll]

this is a love letter to my own fic

hi hello hey, this is an essay about my own fic and the feelings i have about it. fic can be found here.

i am going to try so hard to keep this organized but i don’t know how well that will work soooo let’s go!

on the fic overall:

i just... like magnus. i think he is a fan fave for a reason, but i think there’s a lot of missing discussion of his post-canon situation and the development thereafter. when i finished listening to balance for the first time (in february-ish this year, i think?), i remember being super frustrated with where parts of the fandom had landed their focus. this isn’t an uncommon fandom thing, and i totally get where it comes from. some characters are just super relatable and a lot of fun to write about and have like absolute piles of stuff to unpack, so it’s totally fair that some characters get more focus than others, but where i felt that some of my faves got a lot of fandom focus, others... didn’t.

so this fic was in part an attempt to rectify that, because i wasn’t finding the unpacking of magnus and his emotional / mental state that i wanted. that being said, there are a couple fics that i did draw a little bit of inspiration from, the biggest probably being patterns of migration by goodnicepeople. the depiction of magnus as this big strong dude who also has these quiet vulnerabilities that he doesn’t like admitting to people is like, in part just really accurate to canon, but also something that i really wanted to see explored more, and i didn’t find a whole lot of other fics that fit that, so in part i just wanted to set out to put a little more into that.

also, like, i work in food service, and we are in a pandemic, and i moved in the middle of this year and i started hrt this year and have been dealing with the fallout of coming out and just kind of everything, and this fic was a really good way of just like, distracting myself from everything and sitting down for a little every day and thinking about something else and not so much about everything that was happening around me. so there is a good part of this fic that is just like, me coping with everything and trying to reorient myself a little. and it worked pretty well for that!

on process:

ok first things first, this was never meant to be 133k long. when i first sat down to write this, it was going to be a handful of snapshots set across [undetermined amount of time here] of magnus dealing with isolation and insomnia, and it was only meant to be like, maybe a 20k oneshot? that obviously did not happen. i think my original estimate once i accepted that this was gonna be multichaptered was like 60-70k, but then the chapters started getting longer with each one i finished, and then i wanted to add in an interlude, and then i decided i needed an epilogue, and here we are.

i’ll talk about this in other sections too, but as i wrote, i just kept finding more and more things that i wanted to talk about. i was also in the process of relistening to balance i was writing, and i kept running into little things that happened over the course of the show that i was like... oh shit! and that would inspire another scene or an interaction i wanted to write or something i wanted to focus more on, and the whole thing just kept getting more and more and bigger and bigger.

i’ve said it like 50 thousand times now, but i have never written anything this long before. i tried really hard to be regimented about the way i did it, because from the beginning i knew this was going to be an emotional journey for me to write, but i knew that if i let it slide for a week or so then i would never finish it. so to get through it, i wrote almost every day for a minimum of an hour. the process that i’ve found works best for me when i’m writing is using word sprints, putting on some music, and then forcing myself to tune out of social media and everything else for 25 minutes. i try to do between 750-1k words in that time period, then the site gives you a five minute break, during which i usually check twitter or fact check if i need to, and then i go back in and do another sprint. this works really well for me because i wasn’t trying to hit a specific word goal in any given day, just like... trying to sit down and write. i also tried not to guilt myself too much if i missed a day, or if i only did one sprint instead of two, or anything like that, and that’s kind of what helped me get through the whole monster without instantly dropping it as soon as i had another idea.

on mental health and recovery:

so one of my big personal pet peeves in fiction is the idea that trauma recovery is like, a one time single event deal. like, someone has this big horrible thing happen to them or they have some pressing mental health issue and then someone else walks in and they have one conversation and bam, everything is fine. i was exposed to a lot of [fan]fiction when i was younger that kind of supported this kind of narrative, and i get that there is a certain sort of wish fulfillment thing to that, but it also sucks, being an adult and having Problems(TM) and knowing that it absolutely does not work like that.

so when i set out to write a fic about trauma and mental illness and recovery, i felt kind of a responsibility to not fall into that trap and write it like, okay and then magnus and taako talk about it and taako’s like hey dude you’re depressed but it’s okay and then magnus doesn’t have nightmares anymore. also, because this is taz and the canon of like, historical accuracy is complete bullshit, i can put therapists and psychiatry and psychiatric medications in my fic and no one can tell me i’m wrong and it doesn’t exist. elevators exist, so i can make ssris and anti anxiety pills exist.

but also, magnus as a character is not going to jump into that right away. it is canon fact that he doesn’t like accepting or asking for help with stuff like this, and yes there are a couple big moments where he does, but like i bring up a couple times in the fic, mental health struggles are a big jump from like, a physical fight using swords and axes and shit. and this i think is really accurate to a lot of people’s struggles with mental illness, just taking that first step and admitting that you don’t feel okay, and that you need someone’s help to deal with it. that’s super super scary even to admit to like, your closest friends.

so that’s why magnus kind of shies away a number of times from some of the conversations that people try to start with him about mental health. taako and carey and lucretia and pretty much everyone else approach him at some point about opening up about this stuff, but he pulls away because admitting that kind of vulnerability to someone else is super scary, even if you’ve maybe admitted it to yourself already.

i also wanted to make sure that at the end of the fic, he wasn’t magically better. this is something else that i think people kind of forget, like... trauma and the problems that it causes don’t go away just because of therapy and medication. those things help, they help you reform the ways you think about yourself and about the world, but they don’t change the struggles you’ve been through or the sometimes biological problems that are causing whatever issue you’re having. and i remember reading a lot of fic when i was a kid where someone would be depressed, and then they’d fall in love and get magic dick or something and then they’d never be sad again, which... isn’t great.

but at the same time, i didn’t want it to end on this note like, oh everything is still bad even though he worked so hard to open up and get help, because that sucks, too. so it was really important to me that the fic end on a hopeful note, like, magnus isn’t cured. he still has bad days and bad weeks and sometimes he is just as low as he was before, but he also has like, normal days, which is something that i think you kind of forget can even exist when you’re depressed, or when you’re dealing with any mental illness. but like, i really wanted it to be obvious that things did get better and even if he’s still coping with it and it’s not going away, he’s okay. he’s gonna be all right.

on an unreliable narrator:

this kind of plays into some of the mental health stuff, but one thing that i love about taz that i really wanted to play into with this fic is the idea of limited perspective. griffin does some really cool fucking things with this, specifically in relation to the ipre and the big reveal in the last lunar interlude, with the idea of like... a character can only know the things that they know. like, magnus knows that there is a picture of him depicted as a red robe, and barry knows that they’re all red robes, and taako knows that they found the umbra staff next to a red robed skeleton and that the umbrella spelled out lup at one point, but none of them necessarily know all the things that the other person knew, and none of them know all the things that lucretia knows or that fisher knows or junior knows, etc etc.

unfortunately, just because the pace of the story picks up so much in that last lunar interlude, there isn’t a whole lot of space to explore that like, disconnect between all these facts that they each have as individuals. and given the perspective of mental health and the way that plays into your perceptions of yourself and your perceptions of other people’s perceptions, i really wanted to delve into like… magnus’s misunderstandings.

this is not a strictly straightforward unreliable narrator situation, but i did bring in some elements of that. i really wanted to explore the disconnect between how magnus sees and how everyone else sees him and his issues. there are also a couple moments where he flat out completely misinterprets their intentions, which unfortunately i didn’t delve into as much as i wanted to so they ended up mostly being fun easter eggs for, uh… me? i guess?

one of those moments is the scene in ch 4 where barry and magnus are sitting in the kitchen and barry starts to ask magnus something. magnus assumes it’s going to be about his mental health, and that this is barry stepping up as representative for everyone else to talk to him about it, but it’s really meant to be a precursor to their conversation in ch 6 where they talk about barry and lup and marriage and proposals.

magnus gets a little perspective on this later, i think in ch 7(?) where he’s thinking about how maybe their lives don’t completely revolve around him and he’s missing some of their perspective. but like, they all have their own shit going on, and they all love him and they’re worried about him, but also, barry is thinking about lup. lup is thinking about taako. taako is thinking about lucretia. lucretia is thinking about davenport, and davenport is thinking about his own issues, and so on and so on and they’re not all just like… waiting to pounce on magnus the second he shows weakness.

a lot of that plays into the hypervigilance of ptsd, too. magnus is very aware of any perceived threat, and he sometimes treats the people around him as threats, when all they’re doing in reality is thinking like, man i wish he didn’t live out here by himself all the time.

on a more meta note, i also have a tendency to make every character i write just like, a super good judge of character. i don’t think magnus is that, and i really wanted to lean into that. magnus does not read intention super well, even when that intention is genuinely good.

on the ipre and their relationships:

so i… really don’t write gen fic a lot. even when i do, it is almost always tinged with a little bit of background shipping, and there is some of that in this, but whereas in most fandoms i end up being a multishipper, for some reason with taz i’ve ended up pretty much only caring about the canon ships (sorry…). that being said, the platonic relationships in taz (and especially in balance) are some of the most compelling and important fictional relationships that i’ve ever encountered. like, they are just really well fucking done.

this being the magnus love letter that it is, i really wanted to focus on magnus’s distinct relationships with every member of the ipre crew. i don’t know how obvious this is in the actual narrative, but with the exception of the interlude and the epilogue, the story is broken down into one chapter for each member of the starblaster crew (in order, magnus, taako, merle, davenport, barry, lucretia, lup). i did this specifically because it was really important to me that i dive into all of them and their particular issues. i didn’t quite get the deep dive with merle or davenport that i would’ve liked to, but hopefully in the future i’ll get more time to explore that.

anyway, in case it isn’t obvious, lup is probably my favorite fictional character literally ever in any media created by anyone in the history of time. i say this only because a lot of this fic was set up to build to the conversation between her and magnus in ch 8 out on the mountain where he finally opens up for the first time. there are some really incredible unexplored parallels and relationships in taz (unexplored mainly because like, where would it even fit in canon), and while some of them are super self indulgent (ie, lup and mags, barry and mags), i really really really wanted to dig into those a little more. things like the conversation where taako is talking about everyone brushing over his trauma to rush to forgive lucretia, or lucretia talking about trying to learn to love writing again and recognize happy moments, davenport almost admitting that he’s not completely sure about stepping back into the family in his former role… i could write an entire fic on any of these, really.

but ultimately, this being a magnus fic, i tried to filter those conversations through a perspective of two things: first, how does this affect magnus and his mental health journey, and second, what can magnus do to help this. those scenes where magnus is trying to help someone with something and they’re like, backhandedly helping him are some of my favorite interactions in the fic.

the other thing i really really really wanted to explore that i never see enough of in fic is magnus and carey’s relationship. carey is canonically magnus’s best friend, and yet in fic i feel like she gets pushed to the side a little in favor of the starblaster crew. which i get, they’ve got a hundred and ten years of shared trauma, but also, travis flat out states that carey is magnus’s best friend, so… i mean, there is also a little bit of self indulgence here, because i am also a man who is exclusively best friends with lesbians, but you know.

that being said, i really wanted to emphasize that relationship in particular, which is why carey doesn’t have her own dedicated chapter and instead kind of slides in and out of each one and slowly helps magnus along the way. her personality i also feel is like, the exact kind of thing that magnus needs to push him into accepting / asking for help and moving towards recovery.

on real life parallels:

ok, i swear to god i did not intend to make this a holiday fic posted during the holidays. i started writing this in june, and again, it was only meant to be like 20k and not necessarily entirely set during candlenights. that kind of happened, anyway? candlenights just seemed like the best vessel to get all these characters whose post-canon situations i wanted to explore into the same room, and i finished the first draft around mid october and i wanted to give myself plenty of time for editing, so it honestly just ended up coincidentally aligning with the holidays. go figure.

that being said, isolation ended up featuring pretty heavily in this fic. that i think is to be expected to a certain degree given the nature of mental health and recovery and blah blah blah, but i probably unintentionally ended up leaning into it a little more because like… this year. and the holidays tend to be a time that a lot of us feel really isolated, and this year especially, but one of the big things for me this year is that like, all of my friends live out of state. the closest one to me is still a good 2-3 hour plane ride, which i am absolutely not risking. i had like a hundred plans to go see people and do things this year, and those obviously got cancelled.

probably the biggest one of those things was seeing a friend who i have kind of started a new years tradition of seeing, but we ended up calling that off out of safety considerations, of course. and it sucks! it’s not fun! i also moved out this year and i have my own place and in june i was really hoping that things would be okay by now and i could have all my friends come in from out of town for new years and that didn’t happen. and i wasn’t intending for this fic to be a kind of wish fulfillment of like, here’s my new place post-[saving the universe / coming out and becoming a real person], let me show my found family around my hometown and let’s make new holiday traditions together now that we’re no longer [fighting the apocalypse / literal children] and everything will be fun and happy and good, but that is kind of what happened anyway. [insert joke here that goes like “do you project your real world problems and mental health issues onto fictional characters or are you normal?”]

but yeah, magnus’s mental health struggles did kind of accidentally become a little bit of a pandemic / quarantine life parallel. i did not mean for that to happen, but it did help me tease out a little bit of what it is that i feel like i’m missing and what i want in the future when things are better, and i hope it helped some other people figure that stuff out too, maybe?

and in conclusion:

i said this a little bit in the final notes in the fic, but i am so so so grateful and emotional over the comments i’ve gotten from some of you. i’ve said it already, but this was such an emotional rollercoaster for me to write. i put a decent amount of my own mental health issues into the stuff i wrote into magnus, and it was genuinely therapeutic and like… super helpful and important. it was also a big struggle, and there were some scenes i came out of feeling incredibly drained and like i needed to not write for a week.

so that being said, those of you who have commented things about how this fic helped you deal with your own emotional turmoil or helped put something in perspective for you, i am genuinely so happy to hear that i’ve impacted you in that way like, at all. that is so incredible to me, and not necessarily what i set out to do, but it means so much to hear someone say that and also to know that someone felt comfortable sharing that with a stranger on the internet. thank you so so so much.

again, this fic means so much to me. the fact that it’s impacted even a handful of people in that way is absolutely amazing. some of the things you guys have said have had me seriously choked up. i am so glad that anyone even took the time to read all 133k of this, let alone that it affected people like that.

i don’t know if i’ll be writing more about magnus in this universe. i would love to! but i’m also super happy with where i’ve left his story. i have plans to explore the calen thing in the future, but only kind of tangentially in a side mention and not fully, so who knows? there is more though, a lot with taako and kravitz and lup and barry and hopefully one day i will find the motivation somewhere in me to flesh out everyone else’s situations a little more, too. who knows!

anyway, i just want to say thanks again to everyone for reading, and even more so if you are reading this dumb essay. you’re super cool.

[herbgerblin]

I loved your animatic so much! I know you are getting bombarded with messages so it's okay if you don't post this I just want you to know that I've shared it with everyone I know (inside and outside of the fandom) because it's so happy and just encapsulates all the warm feelings Balance gives me. I love how you draw everyone and I loved picking out all the characters. They're all so happy. you worked so hard on this, you're truly a blessing

Thank you!! There were a lot of messages, so i have put them under the cut, to save them for myself. Sorry not sorry to everyone who I made cry at work :0

astrologicalcedars: Your Soldier Poet King Animatic? T H E G O O D S H I T. Like just. V good.

lateralfire: hey i know like a hundred people have said this already but that animatic is SO RAD OH MY GOD

Anonymous: hi herb your animatic made me cry at work and I’d like to thank you deeply

ivory-leigh: I just rewatched your Solider, Poet, King animatic and it made me tear up a little bit. It’s gorgeous. I loved the way the song contrasts with the images. Here are people with the power to kill and break and maim and now finally, FINALLY they get to use their powers for something as sweet and simple and wonderful as a wedding. They won. They earned their happy ending.

Anonymous: BRO UR SOLDIER, POET, KING ANIMATIC WAS S O GOOD I LOVE THAT SONG AND UR ART WAS SO GOOD I LOVED EVERY SECOND TYSM FOR MAKING THAT MASTERPIECE

thewesternmoose: Your Daughter video gets me every time. I love finding those perfect songs that just fit perfect. And Solider, Poet, King made me so wonderfully happy :D They have both now been added to my lil’ TAZ playlist next to What If This Storm Ends? by Snow Patrol and Echo by Jason Walker. Also you are a fantastic artist :)

aburningbentley: I  put off watching The Animatic because I had work to do and then forgot but I’m making up for it by rewatching it over and over again. It’s so so SO beautiful and I might be crying just thinking about it now :’) The way all these people are coming together to create something beautiful for the people they love & each other, rendered in your art style that is so phenomenal and so recognizable… I’m gonna go cry now. Thank you so much for sharing this amazing thing with us!

ai-dont-care: AAAHHHH I REALLY LOVED YOUR SOLDIER POET KING ANIMATIC !!!!!

thelowlysatsuma: hey? yeah? I just saw your animatic and Let Me Say this is one of the most beautiful goddamn animatics in the fandom and I would ABSOLUTELY be crying if I weren’t in school right now

solarprominence asked: oh man i never realized the soldier poet king animatic that made me cry twice was yours!! genuinely amazing

fastidious-and-a-mess asked: Ok so I just rewatched your Soldier Poet King animatic and I just. Wow. The way you drew everything fit so well with the story and also the song and its all just so beautiful. Also there are so many hands? And they're all amazing, might have to call some dark magic there. But just generally your art gives me so many good feelings and even though I'm basically in the middle of catching up on Grad I now feel the need to relisten to Balance so thanks. Anyways impeccable job, keep up the good work.

of-all-those-who-have-fallen asked: I am so overwhelmed with joy right now I’m crying. The “Soldier, Poet, King” animatic was absolutely beautiful. It encompasses so much of the love and happiness of Balance—and not to mention, your art is incredible. I am in absolute awe—it was just... perfectly wonderful. Everyone working together to put together Carey and Killian’s wedding is just the most gorgeous image ever. Thank you so much for your work. ❤️❤️❤️

faerie-fang asked: i just watched your animation and it was so sweet and made me very emotional :’) 💕

[sasspotato]

Might be a hot take but like upon my relistening to TAZ: Balance, I still am left with an unpopular opinion about the Madame Director, Lucretia, herself. Stunning revelations are one way to put it, but nonetheless incredible. I enjoyed the character but I absolutely despise what she’s done. I feel like she still doesn’t really get it even after they defeat The Hunger.

Don’t get me wrong, Griffin masterfully weaves this absolutely stunning tale of heartbreak, family, and bonds throughout all of Balance. The character of Lucretia is so well developed, I can understand why she did what she did. But I can’t forgive her. I don’t see how Barry or Taako could either.

The crew voted against her idea but she went against everyone’s will, erasing their minds. She was salty they didn’t choose her plan. She saw what they had done to the world by making the relics and she decided to do what she wanted to do. Break the bonds. Even though she’d been told by the effing science officer that the world and it’s people would not survive that.

The crew decided. They voted! They even told her that if it didn’t work, they’d try her idea next. Unsatisfied, but not willing to go against her family of 100 long years, Lucretia goes along with the plan. Makes a relic.

I’m not sure when she started planning to take over and decide for “everyone’s own good” but she wrote the second account of the adventures they’d been on. Lucretia had decided she would be the saviour at all costs. She decided that she knew best. It was incredibly selfish of her - so selfish I don’t even have words for it. What she did to her supposed family was horrific.

She left Lup no chance at being discovered if no one remembered her. She took away Taako’s memory of his beloved sister. Davenport’s treatment was even more ghoulish. And she hunted for Barry. She vilified him and tried to chase him down, knowing that he would try to fix things. She planned to lock him away just like she did Pringles.

It seems almost as if she is a petulant child not getting their way against their parent. And she comes away with, in my opinion, not having learnt the lesson.

That cycle where she was alone and had to run for a year from the judges and the hostile world most definitely changed her. She learnt that running away was the way to survive while ether others were just beginning to learn to stay and fight.

My problem is when she decided everyone’s fate by feeding the journal to the baby voidfish. Personally, that’s why I do not like her. I cannot get over how badly she fucked up and decided she would be the one to fix it. You can’t always do things on your own and she learnt from that cycle alone, that maybe, yes she could do it alone. She needed her family’s guidance. I am convinced that after enough time, they would have gathered the relics themselves to make a final stand against The Hunger. She forced them to do it unprepared and fractured. They had to repair the bonds forged over 100 long years and learn to trust each other again before the fight all because she took it away from them. If they had lost that battle, it would have been her fault.

I don’t have any sympathy for Lucretia or how guilty she feels and I maintain that Barry would never trust her or even look at her the same way again. Taako might be convinced to ignore his trust issues, but I believe the issues are still there. What she did was too catastrophic and too much of a breach in trust for them to get over it.

Still, such a great story and I was thrilled to be taken on such an emotional ride, it’s just everywhere I see people loving Lucretia and I just can’t overlook all the bad shit

[utilitycaster]

do you have any tips for getting into CritRole? I got into live plays mostly thru Taz and have been enjoying D20 as well, but CR seems to be more serious from the little I've watched? Humor was one of those things that really helped me settle into Taz and D20. The long episodes also make it seem daunting.

Hi anon,

You know, unless it’s something with a nonlinear structure like Discworld or something I’ll admit I’m always a little confused by questions of “how do I get into this thing” because like...you go to YouTube and you click ‘play’ and do so for between like, 90-odd and 200-odd episodes depending on whether you watch both campaigns or just one. And having written out my long and rambly response and said this like 5 times I want to say it here at the intro: there are a large number of reasons why I specifically am a bad person to ask, probably the greatest of which is I don’t know you or your life and I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t make any decisions based on what an internet stranger tells you.

With all that said: I’m guessing the answer you’re actually looking for is the answer to one or more of these questions:

“compared to TAZ and Dimension 20, is Critical Role significantly more serious?”

“is using the podcast a reasonable alternative to watching”

“Do I need to have seen Campaign 1 to watch Campaign 2”

“is it really the 4 hour episode length that’s the issue here?”

Feel free to ask me again with a more specific query if I don’t hit on the answer you’re looking for and also I still seem like a resource that would be helpful to you.

Answering the easier questions first: the podcast is a great option and I caught up on Campaign 1 primarily via podcast (I started watching with the start of the second campaign so I’ve watched all of that, though I’ve relistened to a few episodes as podcasts on long drives).

You don’t need to see campaign 1 to see campaign 2; there are some things where campaign 1 knowledge is helpful but none where it’s necessary (and if you don’t intend to watch campaign 1, it’s easy to read the wiki or critrolestats to fill in the gaps) . I like both campaigns but starting with C2 might be an easier investment (not really in terms of length as it’s almost up there by now, but it’s a little smoother to start since they’re used to the format and it begins at the beginning instead of midway through a campaign).

Now: is it serious or funny?

Other than early TAZ Balance when they were mostly goofing around, I don’t think TAZ is explicitly comedy any more so than Critical Role is explicitly serious. I’d put much of Critical Role at the same general position on the funny to serious scale as TAZ Amnesty, and the average Critical Role episode is in my opinion funnier and less dark than The Suffering Game arc of TAZ Balance. In fact last night’s episode of Critical Role had some elements that reminded me of The Suffering Game in it and I was like “oh this is fucking dark”.

While we’re at it, while Dimension 20 is explicitly comedic, The Unsleeping City went fairly dark towards the endgame, and Fantasy High, especially the current livestreamed campagin, has gotten fairly tragicomic at times as well. It’s hard to maintain a long-running campaign that doesn’t have real emotional stakes, even if you’re also trying to be funny, and if someone somehow managed that I wouldn’t want to watch it. Similarly if you’re a group of real friends playing a long-running campaign it’s hard to never have any jokes. I think Critical Role is perhaps less silly at times, but it’s capable of being very funny as well as very serious.

Finally, on episode length: yeah they sure are long episodes. There’s no real getting around that, unless you want to skip around in which case I, a compulsive completist am the wrong person to ask.

You can watch episodes in halves (or quarters, it’s your life). The episode break is a reasonable place to take a real-life break, and that’s how I watch the current campaign - I watch to the break or almost to the break on Thursday night, and then from my stopping point to the end on Friday.

Finally, I should also note that the length of individual episodes only becomes relevant when you’re trying to keep up with weekly episodes. I’m currently very slowly working through Rusty Quill Gaming. Their episodes are just under an hour, but there are still almost 150 of them. I mean, CR also has a huge number of episodes so this comparison isn’t very helpful, but my point is total runtime is the actual daunting thing, not the length of an individual episode. I don’t want to diminish how intimidating it can be - I didn’t start until the second campaign began precisely for this reason - but no advice I would give will shorten that runtime.