#m9 meta

[gennianydots]

I lovd the idea of a m9 atla au, and cabbage seller Veth is galaxy brained, and also i see your earth kingdom Caduceus, and I raise you swamp bender Cadueces?

Okay, ummm Yes.

Swamp bender Cad? Love that for him. Using the “decay and life is sacred and all around us” ideals in a swamp? That’s really kinda perfect for him. Which makes him technically a water bender…

Another thought: former fire nation soldier Caleb secretly surrounding himself with as many water benders as he can (Jester, Caduceus, Beau - maybe - the blue she wears is also very water tribe-ish) so he has damage control if/when he lights shit on fire because he hates his fire-bending (like Jeong Jeong, who says it only brings destruction) due to his (very traumatic) backstory hurting innocents for the fire lord during the war…

🫶🏻

[all-made-of-stardust]

i firmly choose to believe that the reason there weren't any cats in that house when Bells Hells bamfed in was because both Essek and Caleb are responsible cat parents and they both realized that their usual hierarchy of in-home catsitters (Beau & Yasha -> Jester & Fjord -> Veth, Yeza & Luc -> Caduceus) was depleted because they were all gonna busy with the liveshow shenanigans.

You know who wasn't busy? Kingsley.

You know who was next in that hierarchy? Definitely not Kingsley! (It was probably Dairon, but Dairon was busy running around the Cobalt Soul frantically)

So I love to imagine that the world is going to hell and there's at LEAST four cats in their house that need proper care and nobody is available to do it, so in a last ditch effort (because Mittens needs a special wet food diet and Krumel needs some medication and the others are simply too social to be left alone for too long) Essek phones up Kingsley and asks him.

Only for then, four days later, Essek stops into the house briefly to grab supplies and pauses halfway up the hall when he realizes that the cats are nowhere to be seen.

"Kingsley?" he Sends, trusting of his friend but not entirely sure of his character. "Where are the cats?"

"Oh, I had to go deal with a new trade deal by Port Damali!" Kingsley replies cheerfully. "Don't worry, the cats are with me!"

Essek pauses. Inhales deeply. This was the man he helped save, this was the man he mourned before a literal miracle of the gods brought him back.

"Kingsley," he Sends again, already bitter about the extra spell slot usage. "Are you at sea? Are you on a boat?"

"Yup!" comes the unadulterated happy reply. "The Captain's cabin is nice and roomy, and Krumel loves chasing down mice! Surprisingly helpful on a boat, cats! I might keep 'em!"

Essek physically restrains himself from wasting another spell slot on the tiefling. Instead, he touches the stone held in his palm.

"Caleb," he sighs. "I believe our cats were catnapped by Kingsley."

All he hears on the other end is a fit of laughter.

[essektheylyss]

Okay but you know what's really clever about the choice to include off-screen campaign content in the Nein animated show, is that it puts the audience on far more equal footing.

There's a lot of intrigue going on in Wildemount behind the scenes, and those of us who've seen the campaign have an idea of what that is, but rarely a clear answer. There are a lot of interpersonal dynamics that we don't see but that make a major impact on outcomes for the character: not only Essek's dealings with the Assembly but his relationship to the rest of the Dynasty's upper echelon, the Assemblies' interactions amongst themselves, Astrid and Eadwulf's dynamic with Trent or other scourgers, or Lucien's relationship with Cree and the other Tomb Takers. These alliances make or break the characters' decisions with regard to the Nein depending on how much loyalty or trust they share, and they shift a lot while the Nein aren't present.

I think there's a bit of this in tlovm with the happenings in Whitestone and the dynamic among the Chroma Conclave, but these exist primarily to ground the antagonists, because it's not the same kind of story; Vox Machina's story is about how they become Big Damn Heroes. There is political action happening, but while it does have an influence on them, it always exists to an extent to be either a boon or an obstacle to them, because it cannot deal with the threats at hand without heroes (not necessarily Vox, but in the archetypal sense). The Nein, in contrast, are in a story about being the tangential players to numerous plots of intrigue that occupy no small position of power in the world, plots that in fact actively resist the role of heroes, and the struggle for personal agency that comes with that.

So giving more information to the audience about those other happenings means new fans get a lot of the information that existing fans will go into the show with much sooner, while existing fans are receiving new information at the same time. By the time the characters find out what the audience knows, the audience is more or less on the same page waiting for that shoe to drop.

[pocketgalaxies]

beau and caleb butting heads so bad about what to do with essek...oof!

[the-kaedageist]

The first Xhorhas episode of campaign 2 is fascinating because the Mighty Nein are clearly expecting it to be an awful place filled with bad people. Knowing the home they discover within it, this arc is a masterful way of showing the power of dehumanizing propaganda.

They constantly refer to the people they encounter as “the bad guys” even to their faces (especially the Kryn) and barely seem to consider the idea that the people there will be just like people anywhere else. They’re reluctant to help fellow travelers, they hold a lot of ignorant prejudice based on what they heard back in the Empire, and it’s hard not to almost wince at the things they say, knowing the actual culture they’re about to encounter.

This is an experience the audience has alongside them, which also makes it notable. I don’t remember these comments from my first watch; this is insight that I’ve only gained upon rewatching these episodes and realizing exactly how little the Nein understood about the Dynasty, and exactly where all of that information had come from. 

Given where they end up, I had genuinely forgotten that propaganda was all they’d known of the Dynasty before they made the snap decision to go through that tunnel and change the course of the campaign. I’m excited to watch this shift in perspectives happen with the wisdom of hindsight as I continue my rewatch!

[criticalbeauregard]

i meant to post abt this after the episode on thursday but the way beau said "i fucking hated her when we met" makes me wonder if there's going to be a kimallura-esque (in tlovm s3 flashbacks) enemies-to-lovers storyline for beauyasha in the animated series, which i would be really excited to see. i could be being delusional but as much as beau and yasha had a pretty awkward relationship at the beginning of the campaign that turned to resentment for a time once yasha was taken by obann (a resentment based on beau's blooming trust in yasha at the time), i would never have described beau's attitude towards yasha when they met as hatred. i mean... episode one is "will you hold me through the show?"

pike's journey in tlovm has been the most interesting for me to watch as someone who has seen all of c1 bc it's the most unexpected and new for me since they have changed a lot to allow pike to be with the party more. i'm super excited to see if/in what ways they do similar things for yasha's story in m9 animated. i expect her to definitely leave the party at times since they went into c2 knowing that would be part of her character and it became a pretty integral aspect of yasha's story, but there's so much room for more fleshed out dynamics with the party and if that includes beau and yasha feuding i will be thrilled.

[sparring-spirals]

JESTER MASS HEAL AS A CRITICAL MOVE IN THE BATTLE sorry off my rocker again about Jester love and optimism as its own brand of offense and love that sunders enemies in half and boosts her friends in all forms and all the jokes about Jester THE cleric and clerics and healers not always being one and the same, but- Jester did heal, and she healed plenty through the campaign. But sometimes being a protector of the group needed the direct offense. It was, it is, always about- action economy and balancing what will protect her friends, what will save them, what will be enough.

Jester blowing the high level spell on healing, and it working. Beautifully.

It was always about protecting everyone with what she had and all its furious love, and this time, healing her friends was more than enough to rip the enemy apart.

[aeoris4lovers]

personally i think part of the reason yussa says caleb widogast the way he does, with such a weary but (not so) secretly amused voice, is because caleb sends to him all the time and insists on using up words to say “this is caleb widogast” every single time, as if yussa wouldn’t know who it was by the millionth call of the night.

once the nein spread out to do their separate things, caleb definitely started using sending constantly. he does it to everyone, but essek and yussa are the ones who (lovingly) make fun of him for it the most because 1) they can make sense of his wizard babble so he has even more to say to them and 2) they’ve experienced the chaos of jester’s sendings firsthand so they can fully appreciate the comedy of the fact that caleb is even more likely than her to call them at some ungodly hour of the night and talk their ears off about something.

caleb may be much more serious than her on the outside but if there’s one thing he learned from her, it’s that sending is a fantastic spell to abuse when you really really want to annoy your favorite wizards at 2am. what he did not learn from her, unsurprisingly, is that you really don’t need to waste words saying who you are every time you decide to annoy them.

when the three of them are together, essek and yussa absolutely do not let him live it down and have an unspoken agreement to exclusively call him by his full name just to make fun of him, which is fair enough considering caleb will absolutely never stop doing it.

[astralleywright]

i keep seeing people's complaints about the god stuff mill down to "it's getting in the way of the rp, they never talk to each other ever unless it's about gods!" which would have been a fair argument... if they hadn't been trotting it out since 30 episodes ago...

like not only is it not true that its all they talk about it also is?? rp?? very essential for telling the story rp?? great for exploring many of the major themes of the campaign and how the characters relate to and understand them rp??? are they just supposed to talk about their feelings all the time with their feelings being completely divorced from the world moving beneath their feet??? i've been watching Leverage with my mom these past couple months and i can feel myself turning into Sophie Devereaux as i answer this ask. does no one care about story anymore?? about narrative??

[katamaricule]

Ha, sorry to burst into your ask box from nowhere, but I saw your explainer post for DMBJ come across my dash (very helpful!), and I was wondering something random. A year ago I watched the movie The Mystic Nine: Qing Shan Hai Tang because it had Zhu Zanjin in it, but I did not have access to a version with subtitles, hence it was very confusing for many reasons (Zhu Zanjin was still great though lol). I was wondering where this movie fits in with the other parts of the series if you know? I see DMBJ around a lot and I am curious!

I can answer this one!

But before I do: There are subtitles now! iQiyi has the whole thing, so if you'd like to watch that beautiful man be a beautiful opera singer again, well, now you can do so while being less confused. Well, okay, slightly less confused. I'll get to that in a minute.

Back to your question: The movie is set several years before the Mystic Nine drama/book story begins. It's the tale of how Zhang Qishan and Er Yuehong (that would be Zhu Zanjin) met, as by the time the Mystic Nine itself starts, they're clearly old friends. If you've watched this movie, you have seen about the earliest filmed thing in the DMBJ timeline (flashbacks notwithstanding).

However.

The Mystic Nine: Qing Shan Hai Tang is an original story that does not use specific content from the novels for its source material. As such, it both makes several claims that contradict the main series and introduces a lot of backstory elements that no one ever mentions again. It simultaneously expects you are already familiar with these characters and assumes you know nothing so it can just tell you random shit with impunity.

This, by the way, is not unique to this movie. All DMBJ installments are done by different production teams, and all of them have to make up stuff to fill in various gaps/satisfy content standards for Chinese television. Therefore, every series and related movie will have some amount of its content directly contradicted by at least one other series or related movie. It's not like you picked some uniquely terrible starting point that will ruin you for everything else. They're all uniquely terrible, each in their own way. That's the DMBJ promise!

I return to my theory that the best way to understand every DMBJ installment and its various, uh, unique claims about the canon is to regard every story as being told by a different semi-unreliable narrator. So maybe it helps if you think of this movie as Fo Ye doing a double-take, like, sorry, did you just say there was a magical tattooed assassin? and eternal drama queen Er Ye going, shh, handsome, I'm narrating our meet-cute my way.

[definitionofacritter]

Sitting here thinking about how Taliesin said that Caduceus could join in on the next oneshot. Thinking about how he said "give him another 6 months" and he's ready to adventure again.

I'm so glad Kingsley was the character Taliesin chose to play for this. It made sense, it brought the players closer to this character we saw so little of, it allowed him to try out a high-level blood hunter. Of the two, I was hoping for Kingsley.

But Taliesin already knowing 'yeah, I'm ready to come back to the table as Cad when the time comes, and I know exactly how soon he'll be ready' is just... it means a lot.

[wizardnuke]

if i make three posts in a row that circle around one singular topic n could have theoretically distilled it all into one. mind ya business. they're like brain dumps u do before you outline an essay

[essektheylyss]

I'm just thinking about those family secrets and drama that people don't tell the kids about because kids can blurt things out in mixed company even with the best intentions, that you only learn when your mom says something offhand about "And that's why your cousin lived with us for a year," while you're helping in the kitchen at 11pm the night before a holiday and it recontextualizes a whole bunch of stuff from when you were nine and things didn't quite add up but also you were having a great time having sleepovers with your cousin, but also this context raises a LOT of other questions.

So in that regard, it is so funny to wonder like, how much Luc actually knows about Essek. Has he actually met him? I presume he has, but in that case, was he in disguise? Does Luc know him by an alias? Is Essek one of those family members who shows up to events very intermittently and no one really talks about? For that matter, how much does he know about Caleb's history?

I'm just imagining him hearing the "Shadowhand" comment in the Archive and not knowing who the fuck this geezer is talking about let alone why his godfather's being threatened until Aunt Jester says, "And he's going to hurt Essek," and putting a lot of things together that also raises more questions than it answers like

[all-thestories-aretrue]

everyone doing an m9 rewatch, thank u i owe you my life

[princesskuragina]

There's literally nothing worse than joining a fandom where you're really enjoying a found family/sibling-esque relationship or well-written friendship and then checking ao3 only to learn that in fact they are like the second most popular ship tag. Like you can and must hold onto the truth but it does spoil it forever and the knowledge can never be revoked

[monotonecomplainyguy]

LETS GOOOOOOO!!!!

I don’t care if she is meta or not, I don’t care how bad the subclass is, she is going to be a permanent part of my team and no one can change my mind.