#something more happened this episode

[inthiskingdomwewillendure]

Lee Pacein Foundation 2x07

[bacchuschucklefuck]

they licensed his ass

my finished piece of the FWMS (official name definitely 100%) thing we started a few days ago! I had fun I hope folks had and/or continue to have fun with the sketch as well.

[meagancandraw]

You ever think about how neither of them got to say goodbye?

[das-a-kirby-blog]

perhaps if we don't put others down, they would be willing to listen to the points we have to make

[itachanta]

Vash's glasses going glint

[cubbihue]

chimmy changa timmy, why do you hate muffins? am I missing some of the lore?

Timmy doesn't like how they taste. No matter who, how or where they're made, the muffins are all the same to him. It's frustrating because he knows they shouldn't be.

And each time he walks away feeling immense disappointment. Like something should've happened.

He does his best to avoid eating them, but, Timmy found that people react weirdly when you say you don't like muffins. So he eats them anyways. He's unfortunately surrounded by muffin-nuts.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

[the-worms-in-your-bones]

Everyday I mourn the fact that we did not get more bill and twelve content

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

[youngpettyqueen]

I know the decision to have Julian's parents have him augmented was made on the fly but imo its pretty obvious from early on that Julian has Family Issues because he avoids talking about his family like the plague and I think they should've incorporated this into the Julian and Sisko dynamic right from early on because I think it would've made for some really compelling stories and moments and could've set up a REALLY interesting Julian and Jake dynamic which they kinda started to do but never fully went for

[burningfunobject]

S2 arcane spoilers!!

Anyone else notice how dim viktors eyes look in the new season like

And it's like this for nearly every other shot

Compared to his eyes in s1

And he's rlly out of character too

And sure that could be the trauma of EVERYTHING that's happened

But I feel like it's more than that

The hexcore is controlling him obviously so maybe we'll see him try to fight against it??

I really hope he does bc I don't think the whole magic arcane Jesus thing is really working for me tbh

OR if he doesn't manage to get free of the hexcore maybe he decides to lean into it by baking himself even more robotic buy powered by hextech or whatever the new equivalent would be

I've also been thinking maybe he'll start upsetting the chem barrens?? But it seems kinda unlikely

[sluckythewizard]

YOU JUST HƎARD IT FROM [HIS MOUTH] FOR SURƎ!!!

[oswaldpettyeyeart]

he's certainly my angel <3.

everyone should listen to pulp musicals like right fucking now!!!! its so good!

you can commission me something like this! all the info is in my pinned.

[humanmorph]

I step all around the pieces on the floor / Wires and cords, and records, and tapes

[boobchuy]

age swap au in my head goes crazy nothing else in my entire life has had me reimagining an entire series from the ground up like this one

[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.

[sparrowlucero]

if that story is true and Moffat wrote the Doctor's Wife, why wouldn't he just give himself credit?

He didn't write the Doctor's Wife, exactly; it /is/ a work by Gaiman, it's just that Moffat is rumored to have done some pretty heavy rewrites which likely should have warranted a cowriting credit.

Quite honestly this is normal, pretty much any given episode you see is going to have a ton of input from the showrunner (yes, even the ones they said they didn't edit at all), and it's (to my knowledge) up to them if they feel that warrants a cowriting credit. If true, I'm sure Gaiman being a guest writer who's name would undoubtedly draw viewers was certainly a big factor in Moffat leaving himself uncredited; "co written by Neil Gaiman" is just not a good look for marketing.

(The only reason it's notable here is because Gaiman later came off as a bit unprofessional and vindictive toward the production over his second episode (which was very poorly received), usually describing it along the lines of him having wrote a great script he was very proud of and the people working on Doctor Who not understanding his vision or not giving him as much creative control. So "actually, it seems very likely that he had a lot of creative control on the bad one and a lot of rewrites and guidance on the good one" is just a funny little counter to it all.)